


Pantheon

by ArdeaWanders (ArdeaWrites)



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dehumanization, Found Family, Gen, Giant Robots, Light Sci-Fi, NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo 2013, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Rehumanization, and one already has anxiety before the story starts, and then they go have adventures and identity issues, becoming the machine, first person POV, found 30k words on my hard drive and decided they were not terrible, it's about five friends getting installed as integrated pilots in war mechs, it's supposed to have a happy ending I just never wrote that far, lost interest so here it is in all its original fic glory, platonic intimacy, three of which are shaped like horses, toyed with a rewrite as a Voltron fanfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-02
Updated: 2020-11-08
Packaged: 2021-03-09 05:21:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 30,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27345736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArdeaWrites/pseuds/ArdeaWanders
Summary: Five friends band together to survive after their country is invaded. Faced with a terrible choice-a lifetime of imprisonment and hard labor or relinquish all human rights as test subjects-they become unwilling components in the development of their conquerors' war machines. They must redefine identity, humanity and intelligence as they are scattered across the front lines of interplanetary war. Freedom means finding one another and reforging their bond, but not everyone stays on the same side in a war....--Was originally written for NaNoWriMo 2013. I have about 30k words written now plus a bunch of scattered later scenes. I would like to finish this at some point, just no promises it'll happen immediately! I may work on it for this year's NaNo. The long-term goal is a nice happy ending so don't be put off by all the tags. It's neither kink nor horror.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, this is lightly edited for grammar and spelling but more or less as written from Nano. There's some continuity issues, Emily has zero personality, and there's no consistent character voice for POV Kevin. That said I do still love my own premise and will see how far I can first-draft this and if I can bring it through all its planned story arcs. There is one (1) moment of 'we're attempting to be heterosexual and also failing,' and then it's never mentioned again, so I haven't tagged this with any relationship tags.

This was absurd, I thought. How was I supposed to write a life story relevant to people who hadn’t been born yet?

_“Hi. My name is Kevin. I’m human, mostly. A bit human, a bit inhuman; a bit biological experiments and a bag of chemicals and a bit of a big mechanical war machine called Pegasus. Emily keeps bothering me to write down my life because someday someone might want to know about us – the five of us- and I’m the only one who hasn’t recorded it all. The five of us are close. We grew up in the same village, way, way back, on a little green planet called O-076. They started designating all planets with numerical devices shortly after the seventeenth ‘Pandora’ and the twenty-third ‘Eden.’ There were a few too many Valhallas and New-Earths too. I’m from Neartree, which you wouldn’t find in a map even if it was for the right planet, because it was too small. Only the locals knew its name, and it doesn’t exist anymore.”_

That was the problem. Very little existed anymore, and what did exist was locked in my faulty soft biological brain, not the nice big reliable solid-state drives where it needed to go. 

I shut off the recorder with a click and looked up at Emily, who stood behind my chair. “How’s that?” I asked. 

The corners of her mouth quirked up in a funny sort of smile- she was more amused than pleased. “Just keep writing it,” she said. “I’m sure there’ll be coherency later on. Are you going to use the memory banks?” 

“I’ll have to.” I rubbed my temples. Having memory on a solid-state hard drive made it easier to remember things, but sometimes I didn’t want to. Unlike our day-to-day audio/ocular feed, the memory banks recorded all five senses. Reliving a memory could be a bit more … literal than anyone wanted. Some of mine were things I would rather leave in the past, but only I could access my memory bank, and if I wanted others to learn from my experiences, then I’d have to dive back in and relive them myself. Maybe it would be for the better, I reasoned. We had no shortage of time- and maybe it would let me get a little closure from the things I’d avoided for so long. 

She gripped my shoulder for a long moment, then released me to my work and left the chamber. 

I queried for memory bank access and Pegasus requested conformation. I confirmed. Pegasus requested again. _Yes, you dolt. I know what I’m doing,_ I retorted. 

_High chance of psychological trauma._ Pegasus sent a visual of what, exactly, it thought would happen to my brain if I used the memory banks. Pegasus would know- we’d made those memories together. 

_I know! I’m willing to risk it, even if you aren’t._

_Calculating risk assessment…._

_Shut up. Grant access or I’ll circumvent your tired old circuits myself._

_…Access granted._

I set the auto-disconnect for twelve hours. Pegasus dropped the life-support mask in front of my face and I put it on. The tubes down my throat were familiar, my face long since accustomed to the mask’s rubberized margine. The chamber’s lights dimmed until all I could see with my own eyes were Pegasus’ winking status lights overhead. I closed my eyes and switched to audio/ocular, then to audio/ocular playback, and then to full memory playback. The process took a few minutes, rerouting sensation from physical sources to the electronic feed through the cerebral plug. My head knew I was sitting upright in a padded seat in a little chamber between Pegasus’ four legs, its open body cavity above me dangling the dozen cables required to keep my mind and body functioning, but my mind… my mind was telling me I was floating weightless, bodiless, before a huge swarm of audio/ocular input queries. I selected the rout to the memory banks and the access screen flashed up. I scrolled backwards, back through thousands and thousands of files, each a saved five-sense recording of a wake period. The memory bank was compiled during sleep cycles. The longer files… well, let’s just say I didn’t always get enough sleep growing up. 

I found the first one. Pegasus flashed a warning that the file may be incomplete, leading to gaps in sensory input, but I was fine with that. The first series of files were from before I became a part of Pegasus and were recorded and saved during the imprint process. They would play back like normal human memories, but clearer and relatively undistorted, and for that I was grateful. It would make the later recordings a little easier to bear. 

\--- 

_Planet designation O-076, Sovereign State Vaamin, township Neartree_

_Relative age 21 years_

Hannah made an impish face at me across the table. Her nose wrinkled back and she crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. I tried not to smile but was mostly unsuccessful. 

The captain glanced up but she had smoothed her face once more into military blandness- the picture of a perfect recruit. He raised one eyebrow but did not question her. Instead he turned to Joel, beside me. “So you think you have what it takes?” 

Joel spread his massive hands on the table, nearly covering the documents there. “This is my home. This is my family. No hired solder could fight with half the sincerity we bring.” 

“You speak for all of you?” The captain included all of us at the table with the sweep of his eyes. 

Joel nodded, slowly. He was used to being recognized as our leader, I think. He was physically the most imposing of us, especially when seated between the utterly unimposing Emily and narrow-shouldered me, and across from petite Hannah and near-skeletal Andrew. He had dark skin, dark eyes, no hair and a face calm as if it were etched in stone. He’d been brought up to rigidly control his emotions- as the biggest in any crowd, an offhand gesture on his part could do more damage to people or infrastructure than a well-aimed punch by someone the size of Andrew or myself. But I knew he was kind, as well- he had more empathy than any man and most women I’d met. I’d seen him stop a convoy just so he could cross the road and ask a crying child what the matter was. Initially, most children in our town had been terribly intimidated by someone the size and shape of a big black bear but now he couldn’t walk down the street without having a few kids clambering up his back to try and sit on his shoulders. 

Andrew, on the other hand, couldn’t let any part of himself remain still for more than a few seconds. At present he was madly twitching one leg under the table, sending tiny vibrations through the surface of the water in the plastic cup in front of me. His wide grey eyes darted right and left around the room- seeking information? Escape? I didn’t know, but I did know him well enough sense his boredom. I predicted another five minutes, then he’d be up and out of the room without apology, dashing off to find distraction elsewhere. He was pale and freckled and in possession of mop-shaped blond hair, which I don’t think he ever combed with more than his fingers, perhaps once a week at best. In our town, he was known as a bit of a rogue- no one really knew who his parents were, though he’d been brought up by a neighbor family. He was passionate about gadgets that did things- right now, the sort that sent tiny electric currents through household appliances to zap the fingers of whoever touched them next- a juvenile prank for someone his age, but still highly entertaining to the rest of us. As the odd child out in school, he had been ostracized for his outlandish behavior and unpredictable moods until Joel had decided he was interesting and made a point to draw him out. Now, the two polar opposites were near inseparable- Andrew could, and did, get away with nearly anything while Joel patiently shielded him from the indignant victims of his harmless-if a little humiliating-pranks. 

The captain lowered his bushy eyebrows and stared hard at all of us again. “You know what this means. War is not pretty,” he looked at the girls. “War is dark, it’s messy, and you don’t come home the same. I don’t want to send children like you onto a battlefield.” 

“That battlefield is two hundred miles from my back door,” I said. My voice startled even me. I wasn’t exactly known for talking, but I was catching a little of Andrew’s impatience. “We can’t afford to wait and hope it passes us by.” 

“There’s no guarantee the conflict will come this direction,” the captain said. 

“And there’s no guarantee it won’t,” Hannah retorted. She glared at him. “Neartree is at the crossroads of the _best_ roads into the interior. And we have the only guaranteed pure water supply and solarfrac for what, five hundred miles? I bet they’ll be here in a month.” 

“If they are, no amount of basic training is going to help you survive. We’ll evacuate the entire town the moment the fighting turns this way- your families will be safe without your contribution,” The captain said. 

I sighed. I knew he was right, but I didn’t want to hear it. War in the age of starships seemed a silly thing. There were hundreds of habitable planets in the galaxy, most only a few months’ travel out from the nearest warp gate. But war was happening, right here, in our tiny little corner of the continent. Laws governed war- after the Hundred World War, the Core set down a proclamation outlining how, when, why and with what war could be performed- but that only made it more brutal for people like us, untrained, young, civilian. This was a little battle between countries, seen as small and insignificant by our neighbors. Vaamin was being invaded by big Kire. Both countries had hired mercenary armies from offworld to come down and fight for them, but Kire, being an exporter of rare minerals to several other worlds in our solar system, had considerably more capitol to work with. Normally, with such a large discrepancy in power, a smaller country would capitulate without fighting at all, but Vaamin was scared. Kire had annexed four smaller countries already and its political and financial attention was spread thin. Their mercenaries were tired and running out of patience- they wanted their paychecks and a flight home- and they were beginning to bend the rules of fair fighting. 

Izos, a little mountain country north of Kire, had put up nearly no resistance but Kire’s mercenaries had destroyed its population and infrastructure in an effort to end the conflict sooner. We called it the ‘one day war’ because on that day Izos lost over twenty thousand civilians and all their solarfracs. The civilian casualties were twice the number of their fighting force, and the survivors of their military claimed the mercenaries had fired on the solarfracs _after_ Izos had surrendered. Details were sketchy, but we were scared. 

Vaamin was playing for time with its own mercenary resistance. Every citizen not required for basic operation or physically tied down to something (and there were a few who had chained themselves to immovable bits of property, just to show their patriotism) had been shuffled as far from the conflict as possible. Negotiations were open with the more moderate side of Kire and several thousand had already been shipped _into_ the aggressing country, to massive refugee camps where at least they would be safe until the conflict was decided. 

And then there were those like us. Young, arrogant, scared for our land and families, with the images of the exploding solarfracs etched into our minds. We wanted to be a part of the push against Kire, even if just to show the bigger country that not all its neighbors were spineless backwater farmers. So we had gathered, the five of us, and contacted the captain of the guard for our town. Neartree already evacuated everyone not essential to keeping the solarfrac running, but that meant the five of us were all the more eager to help- it was our families who kept the big energy plant operational and supplied sterile water, synthetics and fuel to the surrounding five towns. The plan was for the plant to be handed over peacefully if the fighting did get close enough, but we didn’t believe the mercenaries would let that happen. 

Not after Izos. 

Hannah, for all her five feet of temper, stood the most to lose. Both her parents worked at the solarfrac. Her ancestors had built the plant and every single penny of her parents’ wealth was tied up in machinery, land, infrastructure and the house that had contained all five generations of solar engineers. I didn’t want to be too critical of her ties to her lifestyle, but even if Neartree survived Kire would seize the plant and install its own technicians and Hannah and her family would lose everything. She fought for status as much as for family, but for her it was important. She flickered her dark eyes from me to the captain and back again and her mouth was set in a hard, angry line. 

“We’re willing to risk all that,” Emily said. She shrugged her shoulders. “You know what we know- about Izos. If they fire on the solarfrac, it’ll destroy the entire town. There won’t even be topsoil left on the fields for miles around. I think I’d rather die here trying to save it than run off to hide in a dusty camp in enemy territory.” 

“They won’t be enemies much longer,” the captain said. His voice already registered defeat. “We can’t hope to win this.” 

“We don’t need to win,” Joel said. “We only need to survive. Here. In our homes, on our land. Make it clear to the mercenaries that we’re more trouble than we’re worth to bother destroying. There are other roads to the interior. Other solarfracs to take.” 

The captain sighed and rubbed his temples with his fingers. “I can’t take you into the guard, not this late. We haven’t got enough weapons to go around and no one to train raw recruits. I can see if our hired friends have a place for you, though.” 

“The mercenaries?” Hannah snorted. 

“You’re the ones who want in on the bloodshed, children. You decide how much you’re willing to sacrifice.” 

I stared at the captain. Mercenaries… well, it wasn’t unexpected. Vaamin was not a place of war. We’d all been a little surprised our town guards had weapons beyond crossbows and trebuchets, when they marched out weeks ago to organize the first evacuations and help the mercenaries build their fortifications. Of course they didn’t have anyone to spare for training, much less weapons more effective than the hunting rifles they’d pilfered from the local marksmanship club. 

The price we pay for living in peace, I though. The price we pay for having the worst criminal in the town’s history be famous for zapping the mayor with his own toaster. I eyed Andrew. He’d be in seventh heaven if he ever got off this world and into a place with technology more advanced than our outdated data processors and solar batteries. 

Emily reached across Joel’s lap. I knew the gesture- my hand found hers. She winked at me. Mercenaries meant adventure, and adventure meant she wanted in. 

Joel took careful stock of us. He seemed to gather up our intentions, our warring desire to remain here, of this place, and die on our own soil, or to lend our strength to a foreign group and chance at least life with dignity. 

“We will fight,” he said. “Send us to them.” 

The captain shook his head. “Your parents will hang me for letting you go.” 

“We’re all of age,” Hannah retorted. “And there’s no law against leaving the mercenaries as soon as all this is over. If we’ve got a hare’s chance of stopping them blowing this place to a new star, we’ll take it.” 

  


And take it we did. Three days later the five of us strapped into bench seats in the rear of an old farm truck and drove south down the winding village road. Turns out we weren’t the only idiots in town- ten more joined us, other youths sent by the captain to join the mercenaries or die trying. When the troop truck of fifteen farmhands, carpenter’s boys, idealistic children and our one sarcastic socialite rolled into the mercenary camp, a very long drive later, all of us had already begun to wonder if this was truly the life we wanted. 

We wondered again when we met our new captain. 

He was as tall as Joel and nearly as wide, though his face was lined by strong emotion. Mostly shouting, we came to understand. I found out later he could speak in a normal voice, but for the first two weeks we didn’t hear it. 

Mercenary training is a rough, fast affair. We were literally thrown in, headlong into a heap in the middle of a crazy-pitched tent, and told to sort ourselves into a line based on who we thought was the strongest and most capable among us. Somehow this resulted in Joel at one end and Hannah, furious and swearing, at the other. Emily and myself were somewhere in the middle, until Joel pulled us down the line to stand a little closer to himself. 

I looked around for Andrew but he had already vanished. When the camp lights cut out a moment later, I knew where he was. He spent most of training in the back of a broken-down cattle car, an improvised brig, and the rest of it gleefully messing about with any electrical device he could get his hands on. Finally, someone in the mercenary group caught on and assigned him to ‘tech division,’ where he promptly figured out how to apply his spark-making expertise to a range of clever little explosives. 

The rest of us… well, Joel was there, and we survived. Our fifteen from Neartree were one of a dozen such groups joining the mercenaries. We learned to slog through a little mud, shoot a few weapons, wear a bulletproof helmet, and not ask questions when told to do silly things. We heard a lot about ‘real fighting,’ ‘real men,’ and ‘real death,’ but they didn’t mean much until the day of our first skirmish. Seems such things were a bit planned and it was no secret the opposing force of mercenaries were paying us a visit. We recruits were placed on the fringes and told to take notes- there’d be an exam later. 

I remember watching the battle from near the top of a little nol and thinking it was a little like a game of checkers, with different groups advancing, halting, and advancing again, taking over one another until they met an adversary, then fighting for the right to occupy the same space. I watched a lot of bullets fly but few men were badly wounded. The mercenary way seemed to be one of intimidation and kicking dust. 

Indeed, when we returned later the commander told us as much. 

“This is all posturing. You are farm brats. You’ve seen two bulls square off and shove each other around a pen for days before one of them really decides to fight. And then it happens, and one bull’s alive and well and the other’s hanging over the fence. We know which bull we are. They know which one they are. They’re still in a shoving mode and we’re not going to risk breaking them out of it.” 

“Is there any hope?” one recruit asked. I recognized him from the farmstead a few miles from my own. 

The commander shook his head. “None at all, but they aren’t going to kill us if they can help it. Mercenaries usually try not to.” 

“Tell that to Izos,” Hannah spat. 

“I wasn’t at Izos,” he replied, calm. “Neither were they,” he thumbed in the general direction of the opposing camp. “My guess? Izos was just two drunk idiots fighting in a village square, only one of them had launch codes and the other had a stick. It happens.” 

To hear it spoken plainly took the wind from all of us. 

“I know you signed on to save your homes and families.” The commander tapped the stack of papers on his camp desk. “I won’t hold you to them once this is over, but my guess is a few of you will come with us. Your little world is going to be unified under the Kire banner before too much longer and anyone who can’t bear that thought has no business sticking around.” 

I saw the set of Hannah’s lips. She talked big and her temper was up, but I knew she would give anything to go home once this was all over. Andrew didn’t have much of a home. If the mercenaries offered him a good position working with electrical things and codes, he’d stay with them. Joel… he would be torn. He loved Andrew like a little brother and would hate to leave him alone in an unfamiliar world, but he had his own parents and siblings to consider. Same with Emily, same with me. We would stay. 

If home stayed too. 

  



	2. Chapter 2

  


The pushing and shoving lasted another three weeks. One morning we rolled out of our canvas bedsacks to the sound of a single reverberating explosion. All of us looked first towards home, but no- no grand grey and yellow pillar signaled the death of our solarfrac. 

Then someone shouted and pointed and we saw. A solarfrac had gone up, but not Neartree’s. It had been Chevern’s, a bigger town a day’s drive west of Neartree. The pillar was well up and visible, even across such a distance, though dissipating already even as the sound reached us. 

The commander gathered the entire troop. He spoke quietly with each captain, and the captains, in turn, spoke to their divisions. Ours was not shouting. He spoke quietly, and until that moment I had not thought him capable of it. “That wasn’t them or us,” he said. “Chevern blew their own solarfrac.” 

“What?!” That was Hannah. 

“Permission granted to be incredulous,” he said, wryly. “It made a big bang but from the sound of it everyone evacuated beforehand.” 

“That’ll have destroyed everything for miles around,” I said. “They must have been desperate.” 

“Or stupid.” The captain looked us over. “I don’t think we have any of that sort here, but there are those who would rather burn their world behind them than bend for an enemy.” 

“What happens now?” Joel asked. 

“Anything. My guess is we’ll start our bullfight here in about two hours. If you want to run, run now, and don’t go near any solarfracs. You kids are a steady bunch, but you’re just kids out for a lark. You don’t want to be here today.” 

“What will happen to you?” Emily asked. 

“We’ll live, or we’ll die. Most likely, we’ll just pack up, hand over our papers, get recommissioned, and march thataway,” he pointed north. “We’re mercenaries. Once your government starts rolling, we’ll head to the next nearest paycheck, and that’s written in Kire’s name.” 

“Bastards,” Hannah snarled. 

“Little lady, you’re too young to have ever wanted for anything so bad you’d murder for it, but most of us have, or will if we have to. This is not a life of adventure, it’s a life of blood and money. Now get your things together and go home, or run for the hills if home’s got a solarfrac and a patriotic streak.” 

Joel gathered us up with his arms and propelled us out of the tent. The others followed and drifted off. We just stood for a long moment and let the futility wash. So that was it. Five weeks of playing army, and then home in time for annexing, or a very quick, very flashy death. It was Hannah’s family at the controls of the solarfrac… 

Andrew realized this the moment I did. He shot her a sidelong glance. “They gonna kill us all?” he asked. 

She slapped him. None of us moved- he had to have seen that one coming. 

“Well, are they?” he asked, louder. “Cus if they are, I’m staying here. I ain’t going back to that.” 

“They won’t,” she replied. “They would never.” 

As she spoke I looked up, and by chance saw the flicker of brilliant yellow and white on the horizon. Too far east to be Neartree, farther away than Chevern. Maybe Brae. 

“…no. They would.” Andrew snapped his teeth together. 

“We have to go somewhere,” Emily said. “You heard the man- there’ll be war here soon enough.” 

“We stay together,” I said. 

Joel nodded. “On foot, we won’t be home for days. If the solarfrac is going to be destroyed, we’ll be outside its blast radius.” 

I heard something like popcorn popping- gunshots, still distant. 

“Move it, kids,” a mercenary I recognized but did not know shoved through our group. “We’ve got hostiles coming in over the ridge. Either grab guns or get out.” 

I looked up; the ridge east of the camp was steep, covered in brush and rock outcroppings, without enough cover to hide a rabbit. Why would they…? 

Unless they were lugging artillery. Then cover wouldn’t matter nearly as much. 

Three scouts on the ridgeline shouted, fired, and fell, one by one. We stood as if transfixed as the first enemy bullets whizzed past our ears, then the five of us broke and ran, still together, trying to find anything solid enough to hunker behind. 

Bullets. They tore through the tent fabric around us and pinged against the metal crates and vehicles. They were small caliber, made to punch clean through a body without causing too much residual damage- but they could still kill. 

Somehow we made it to cover behind an armored truck. Joel looked into the truck, pronounced it empty, lamented the lack of keys, and boosted Andrew up into the seat to remedy that. The rest of us kept our heads down and wondered if there was a penalty for stealing trucks during conflicts. We’d been told to get out- so it wasn’t really deserting, was it? 

Then long, slender rifle barrel poked out from behind the truck’s tailgate. Joel grabbed it, caught its wielder under the chin with his elbow, and dragged the senseless body around to us. We didn’t recognize him- probably an enemy mercenary, we hoped. Joel handed me his side-arm and took the assault rifle for himself. Hannah got the combat knife and Emily took two grenades. We heard the engine start up and piled into the bed of the truck, keeping down behind its armored flanks. I stole a glance at the ridge- four big, black rail-cannons had appeared along it, but they were not pointed towards us. 

The road that ran through the canyon was a good one- paved, wide, and a main arterial to the larger northern cities. The enemy had already written off the mercenary camp at the canyon’s mouth- they wanted command of the road. The artillery wasn’t for us- it was for whoever came next. 

Another metallic scream and tremor reached us- another solarfrac gone. I wondered if it really was our own people blowing them up, or if it was the government, or the enemy, or someone else entirely. I didn’t think I’d ever find out. 

Our truck rattled through the camp- it was a big truck, with wide, heavy wheels meant for covering rough terrain- and it handled the scattering of tents, discarded equipment and occasional lifeless body fairly well. We picked up half a dozen other survivors, young recruits like ourselves come in from the surrounding towns hoping for a chance at staving off the inevitable. 

We’d failed. We looked out onto the tiny camp, into a sky dark with ash and smoke, and over each other speckled with dirt and blood. 

We’d failed. 

Not that we’d had a snowball’s chance on the solarfrac of succeeding. 

The truck rumbled on. I was worried about that line of artillery and our own rout out of the valley- would they be aiming at a truckload of deserters, or would the mercenary ideal of ‘not too many casualties’ hold out? Or was that all bogus and the mercenaries really were responsible for causing a few hundred thousand deaths by detonating the solarfracs before the evacuations had happened? 

I didn’t know. I didn’t want to think too hard about it. Joel was shouting directions through the truck window to Andrew and the others were watching for roadside trouble. I saw Emily lob one of her grenades at the hood of an approaching assault vehicle painted with Kire colors. Hannah took aim at another, though her handgun didn’t have the caliber to pierce its armor or do more than scratch its windshield. 

Their efforts did deter any serious pursuit and moments later we were barreling down the road out of the canyon, heading north and homeward as fast as the loaded truck would move. I didn’t have a huge amount of faith in Andrew’s driving ability- he tended to get distracted by the digital readouts and forget about the road- but we seemed safe enough. 

Joel had gathered four wounded kids into one corner and gotten the truck’s folded tarp cover under then for a little extra cushion. None of us had first-aid experience, but a passenger I’d never seen before did- he had cut up pilfered clothing into strips and was doing what he could to bind gunshot wounds. No one’s injuries seemed life-threatening, at least not from my inexperienced view. 

It was late when we stopped. I guessed the first few stars must be visible somewhere above the murk, but the dust kicked up by the solarfrac explosions obscured the sky. Andrew found a turnout with a small fuel station and water pump. All power off and deserted, naturally, but we found a hand pump behind the attendant’s shack and managed to fill both fuel and water tanks. Hannah poked around the shack and came up with a few cushions and old blankets, stored there against long nights and cold weather, and we appropriated them for the comfort of our wounded. I finally learned their names and stories: Alina, a girl a bit older than me, and her younger brother Emyr, both with leg wounds from the same volley of bullets, Katylin, an older woman who had been a marksman for a hunting firm and had taken a shot high on the right shoulder, and Frank, a boy younger than all of us, who had been shot in the elbow. His wound, being through a joint and rather damaging, was the worst of them and there was a chance he would lose use of the joint if not treated. 

Emily was all for staying put but Hannah wanted to press on- she had a nagging fear her parents would blow the solarfrac if they thought she might be lost- and I thought she was right. I also thought it was high time we knew a little more about the situation. 

I found Andrew in the truck cab, following the same train of thought. Most vehicles, from farm tractors to big military convoy trucks like this one, had a simple biometric reader for a keypad. This could be overridden with the right key card, or activated by the right set of individuals. Andrew’s first real paying job had been as a digital locksmith, fixing broken readers for our town, and this one hadn’t been much trouble. 

The truck’s communications array was another story. The digital readout proclaimed it in need of an exact biometric signature- keyed to obey one person’s voice, fingerprints and other organic markers from the tones of heart rhythm to the faint electromagnetic field given off by a live human body. They were decidedly harder to subvert than a simple vehicle’s keypad, from the sound of Andrew’s dialog with himself and the piece of equipment. I was glad he kept his voice low or the enemy would have found us by following the trail of blistered paint. 

“Going well?” I asked. 

He pulled his head from under the dash and glared at me. “…suspicious, uncreative bastards,” he muttered. “They’ve got redundant systems that don’t do anything but clog up their security. I’d have been done by now, but I have to fix their stupid layout first.” 

“By dawn?” 

“By the time you go take a leak and get back, if you go now.” 

I took the hint and left him at it. 

I saw Hannah and Emily standing a little apart, talking quietly. They turned when I drew near. “What do you think?” Emily asked. “Forward or back?” 

“Are we going forward or back right now?” 

“Well, back home,” Emily said. 

“Backwards,” Hannah said. 

“Those mean different things,” I countered. 

“You bet they do,” Hannah retorted. “I know my parents have their finger on the button. I’m… slowly realizing there’s nothing I can do about that. If they blow it up, they blow it up. I want to go back but… I don’t want to die just because this stupid war made my parents so angry they’d sacrifice their solarfrac and blow us all to smithereens. If I’m going to die, then it’ll be on my own terms, not because of something like this.” 

“Something as big as our country ceasing to exist?” Emily asked, quietly. 

“Countries come and go,” Hannah made a dismissive gesture. “We fought so the mercenaries wouldn’t blow our solarfrac. We did our part, failure thought it was, and now we move on.” 

Emily sighed. She didn’t like to hear that. I edged a little closer to her. 

“All of us are old enough to make our own future,” Hannah said. 

“You really don’t care about this, do you?” Emily snarled. “My parents are back there too! If the solarfrac goes, they die! Everyone we left behind dies! All our town and land and… and… “ her voice caught. 

I put my arm around her shoulders. “I know,” I said. “But Hannah has a point. We can’t stop what happens next.” 

Joel moved up behind us. “Andrew has the radio working.” His voice was flat, hurt. “There are no negotiations anymore. Kire is accusing Vaamin of blowing the solarfracs and destroying their own people.” 

“That can’t be true!” Emily pushed away from me. “Our government wouldn’t do that!” 

Joel spread his huge hands wide, empty. “Neartree is the only city south of the interior that hasn’t blown theirs.” 

“Is there any word?” I asked. “Someone in Neartree must be talking.” 

Joel shook his head. “No transmissions we’ve been able to find.” 

“What is Kire going to do?” Hannah asked. 

There was a faint rumble on the horizon, a streak of light arcing across the sky. “That,” Joel answered and pointed with his chin and a sharp jerk of his head. The arc of light became three, then five, and then smaller bits of light split off and spiraled downward. Some of the explosions were visible- little bursts of light like spores from a puffball- each a target of interest. Our people. Some piece of infrastructure or target. 

“One-man fighters? This was a ground conflict!” Emily protested. “They can’t go areal without a tactical release!” 

“They got it,” Joel said. “The planetary council gave them permission.” 

“Why?!” 

“Because of Izos. Kire convinced them it could neutralize Vaamin without letting Vaamin do to its people what Izos did. They say they’re saving lives with this.” 

Another set of fighters passed, nearer this time. Flying north, towards the interior. I thought of the massive refugee camps already inside Vaamin. Could there be truth to what they said? I didn’t want to think about it. _Not my future._

We stood and watched the fighters pass, one volley after another, and ever the explosions crept northward, farther from us, closer to home, closer to our capitol and the heart of our country. 

  


I didn’t want to think it could happen. When it did, I wanted to turn around so I wouldn’t see, so I could pretend I never knew, but that wasn’t an option. Instead I grabbed Emily around the shoulders and held her as tight as I could, as if between us we would find the strength to stand and watch- that terrible pillar of yellow fire and light sweeping upward into the murky night sky. The shockwave reached us minutes later and I gasped at the tremor in my bones. She made a small noise and gripped my arms where they crossed over her chest. I felt Joel’s massive hand close over my shoulder- Andrew tucked himself between Joel and I and Hannah was enclosed in his other arm. We watched until the pillar of light was gone, and then we stood longer, until our legs were weak and our knees ached, until the others in the truck, survivors whose homes had gone up with the earlier explosions, called to us to remember them and move on. 

Neartree was no more. Vaamin was gone, forever, wiped from the planet’s face, its people scattered and leaderless, wards of a bigger nation, labeled now as the ones who would slaughter their own children to keep from bowing to the inevitable. Word came over the military radio at dawn- surrender was complete. The mercenaries were already unified and redeployed as a peacekeeping force, gathering survivors and supplies and assisting in the setup and policing of the refugee camps until infrastructure could be repaired and people sent back into the torn land. 

We turned the truck around and drove south, through the tattered remains of the mercenary camp and its six weeks of memories, south to the nearest border stop, and turned ourselves in. There was a short question of identity papers, new I.D. cards issued with our new nationalities as Kire citizens, and then a long list of directions and an armed escort to the nearest ‘paramilitary holding facility.’ 

I didn’t like that name, but we had no choice. 

Joel asked about our families at the border- none of us had wanted to- and had found out they were gone. Joel’s, proud and nationalistic, had stayed in Neartree. Mine had been among the few confirmed dead when their refugee convoy had crossed a bridge damaged in the attacks and it had collapsed beneath them. Emily’s parents had been on the same convoy, and though their bodies had not yet been recovered there wasn’t much hope. Hannah was the last surviving member of her family, as her parents had sacrificed everyone when they detonated the solarfrac. Andrew’s foster family had vanished completely. He stayed a little closer to Joel; we all did. 

We now were family. 

One night. Not many hours to change the tilt of the world, but it had been changed. I learned later Kire had a global majority vote with Vaamin’s capitulation; they could forego war and negotiate their way to planetary unification. This was the last of the bloodshed. 

I wanted to hate them, but on the long road to the holding facility I couldn’t bring myself to. I knew the old adage –one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter- but I didn’t want to be that man. 

The facility was more or less what we expected it to be- a place to collect up those most probable of causing trouble later on- and giving them their options. We were shuffled through a series of lectures on Kire’s position and actions during the war, interviewed on our part in it, offered counseling to overcome residual grief and hatred, and every other postwar platitude the victors could think of to prevent future uprisings. 

I don’t know how much of what we heard was truth and how much of it was blatant propaganda, but I do know I walked out of it with no greater understanding of my future than I had had before. I think I left some part of myself back on that road, at the little shack, watching my past turn to dust. 

  


The entire process took five days. We were housed with and ate with other Vaamin youth and a handful of Izos survivors. Many others had thrown themselves in with the mercenaries and were facing the same hopeless horizon we were. What next? What can I possibly do now? 

On the last day, Emily and I sat on the facility’s wall looking out over the low, level arid fields surrounding it- a buffer between us and the greater metropolis of Theco, one of Kire’s midsized cities and a rather large center of trade for the area. Her hand found mine and she interlaced our fingers. “Any thoughts?” she asked. 

I shrugged. “Joel is talking about staying, signing on with the Kire military. They’re moving to nationalize their military, instead of just using mercenaries. Some of the mercenaries are staying to train them. I think our lovely commander is one of them.” 

She wrinkled her nose. “Much as I liked playing solder, I wouldn’t mind not getting shot at for the rest of my life.” 

“What’s Hannah’s plan?” 

“She’s staying with Joel. She’s not ready to be alone yet, and they’ve been friends for a long time. Andrew is staying with them too- he doesn’t care where they go, as long as they’re together.” 

“And you and I?” 

She looked over at me. “I’d rather we were with them. Neartree is just us now. None of us have to ask how we are or where we’re from, and I don’t want to answer those questions yet.” 

“Neither do I,” I said. I drew her hand a little closer, hoping she would follow. She did. We sat, shoulder to shoulder, until a guard saw us and called us down. In hindsight, I think I might have just stayed on that wall for the rest of time if I knew what our decisions would cost. 


	3. Chapter 3

  


I shuddered, that sort of full-body shudder that comes from dreaming you’ve fallen from a very high place and are about to come to a jarring stop. Pegasus queried for status, and I mentally slapped it away. _Leave me in peace a little longer._ I gently pried the mask from my face and coughed as the cold, unfiltered air hit my throat. Emily had left a cup of warm water beside me and I sipped from it, gratefully washing the taste of old bile from my mouth. I looked up at Pegasus. 

_Ok, I’m fine. You can ask now,_ I thought. 

_Status normal?_

_Yes, status normal. See any brain damage?_

_… slight emotional instability detected. Traumatic memories suspected. Status normal?_

_What are you, my nurse? Status normal, Pegasus. Because I said so._

_Medical scan complete. Select from suggested treatment?_

_The nurse comment was a joke._

_Vocal inflection suggests humor and/or sarcasm. Select from suggested treatment?_

I sighed. Pegasus was… weird sometimes. I found it hard to separate what I knew of the machine from what I _felt_ of it- the subtle movements when my thoughts were elsewhere, the doubled phrases. Perhaps I really was just projecting onto the machine like the others said, but some nights, like tonight… I ran my hand over the port in my arm, feeling the metal under my skin, the tiny movements of muscle that registered impulses from Pegasus’ computers. 

I had forgotten how tiring the memory banks could be until I tried to stand and failed. I tried again and managed to at least lean forward. I queried for disconnect and Pegasus granted it, but not without pause. Begrudgingly, I wondered? I had never solved the question of what exactly Pegasus did when I wasn’t connected to it. The others didn’t see the question relevant- we were our beasts, not their riders, and of course they just shut down like a turned-off computer when we weren’t inside them- but I wasn’t so sure. 

The big cerebral plug disengaged and the spinal interface after it- I shivered as the metal buried in my back chilled with the outside air. Slowly, very conscious of having spent twelve hours immobile, I found my feet and stretched. There was a pair of coveralls hanging from the partition in front of me and I pulled them on. Such a luxury, I thought. We’d all been pretty thrilled when one of the colonists had offered to make us insulated coveralls to replace our worn, not particularly efficient repurposed bathrobes. Having plugs and ports scattered about one’s body tended to interfere with normal clothing, and none of us could sew. 

Enough for today, I thought. More than enough. Those memories were old, but I had work to do and people to see in the present. 

  


“At least that part was fun,” Andrew said. He was perched on my metal crate of spare parts beside the padded chair, fiddling with my cords. “You going through the whole bank?” 

“Before I’m done, yes.” 

“Why?” 

I shrugged. “I want to. I think it’s important.” 

“The rest of us just wrote, you know. Or dictated. I can give you the program I wrote to write mine for me.” 

“Thanks, but no,” I sent him a wry smile, or at least that’s what I hoped it was. Facial expressions between us were a bit hit and miss. “And besides, you’re right. This part is fun.” _Fun for you, maybe,_ I thought. At the time, it had been not so fun for me. A bit painful, a bit scary, and sometimes exciting, but no, not fun. 

Well, maybe a little. 

I put my hand out and he placed the cerebral plug in it. I threaded it through the notch in the chair’s headrest and slid it in- now, the notion of putting the big many-pronged thing into my own skull was routine, almost comforting- like putting on shoes, for the rest of the world, I think. 

Immediately Pegasus’ status flashed up in my vision and a slight trill came through the audio input. I signaled conformation of both- audio/ocular were normal- and Pegasus began scrolling through its updates. The spinal interface slid in and my back twinged, as it always did, but not painfully. Or at least if it was pain, my body didn’t register it as such. I wondered how much Pegasus could control my perceptions outside of audio/ocular, but thinking too hard about it would probably drive me mad. 

“How long this time?” Andrew asked. 

“Twelve, again.” 

“You’re crazy.” 

“Why? You’ll stay in Eclipse for days if you’ve got a code to make.” 

“That’s different. I’m _doing_ something then.” 

“I’m doing something too.” I closed my eyes and Pegasus’ ocular input took over. The walls of light and code flashed past, a three-dimensional world of my own mental projection. “See you in the morning.” 

He tapped my wrist as a way of goodbye and I engaged the audio. 

Now the world was different. I _knew_ it was all within my own image projection, filtered through Pegasus’ computer and sent back via the audio/ocular input, but that didn’t make it any less real, any less… home. 

  


\---

  


We all sat on the floor, crosslegged, or on our knees, or in whatever position was most comfortable on a chilly cement slab. There really wasn’t one, and so we fidgeted back and forth and cursed at feet long since gone to sleep. I sat between Andrew and Emily, with Joel on the far side of Andrew and Hannah beyond. Andrew was fidgeting more than most; unfortunately, there were armed guards at all exits. I wouldn’t put it past him to try disabling the smart locks on their weapons, but even he knew he wasn’t _that_ fast. 

Everyone in the room, aside from the guards and the woman who seemed to command them, was young. Our age, or a little older. Some younger. I recognized a few faces from the mercenary camp. Some looked distinctly Izos, some a bit more Kire. Most were Vaamin, I guessed, by the occasional fresh bandage and general air of defeat. Joel held his head up, and by extension we did too- though none of us felt much like it. 

A woman walked up and down each row, checking off something on her tablet. When she was finished, she stopped at the front of the room and faced us. Her heels clicked together, and the room fell silent. Andrew even stopped his fidgeting. 

She cleared her throat and began. “You are not here because you are special. You were not selected based on any qualifications beyond attitude and demeanor. Rather, you are here because you hundred have been judged those most likely to cause disturbances.” She surveyed the room, but no one responded. We knew she was right. “Each of you will be fitted with a tracking device,” she held up a small metallic object about the size of my thumbnail. “If you refuse, we will kill you.” 

At that, a ripple went through the room. “Don’t mistake my meaning,” she said. “If we _wanted_ you dead you’d already be so. Kire has no shortage of citizens, but we do have a shortage of security and peace. If you find you are unable to abide by our laws, death is your most pain-free road. Because we deem your obedience to be subject to situation, the tracking devices will let us know if you are gathering with other known malcontents. They will also prohibit your use of certain civilian or military networks. You will find life outside our civilized centers to be easiest. You are all physically capable of hard labor, and I suggest you prepare yourself for a life of such.” 

She nodded to the guards. Two came forward- one with a conventional weapon, the other with a strange medical-looking injector. I wasn’t keen on the sort of future she had outlined, but it made sense- from Kire’s point of view. The citizens of several conquered nations would not make for the most peaceful of voices. 

The guards started down the line; the device was placed against the shoulder of each recipient. A faint click, a wince, and a tiny mark of blood, and the device was deep under the skin. “Should you get creative about removing the device, I shall warn you now it is tamper proof,” the woman said. “If it loses connecting to the individual, it will release a tiny but potent toxin, enough to kill those in close proximity.” She did not define ‘close proximity.’ I watched the guards go row by row until they reached ours. So far, none had opted out. Then it was our turn. Emily flinched but made no sound. I hissed- it _hurt-_ and Andrew spat at the guards once his was in. Joel could have been a statue, and Hannah just swore. 

Once all the tracking devices were in, the woman spoke again. “That was your first choice. Here is your next. You can stand now and file out the door, where waiting trucks will take you to a farming region ten days’ drive south of here. You will be installed with laborers there, and will remain there for the rest of your natural life, doing what work is available. Or you may remain, and we will find a use for you here in our research facilities.” 

There was the sound of much rustling. Many stood. Almost everyone stood. I stayed seated, because Joel stayed seated. Andrew fidgeted, but Joel placed his hand on Andrew’s shoulder and he stilled. Emily glanced at me and smiled, a thin, small, scared smile. Farm work just wasn’t us, not anymore. 

“….Very good.” The woman looked over those who remained. I noticed her eyes, behind her glasses, were brown. Now that the room was more empty, much more empty, she stood closer to those of us who remained. She was older than I’d first thought- there were lines in her face that her makeup could not hide. 

“For those of you who remain, one more choice. Chemical or technological research?” I saw a smile play across her face- she was enjoying this, I thought. 

Andrew slid closer to Joel. He whispered something in Joel’s ear and Joel nodded. Guards stepped forward but the woman waved them back. “You have decided?” she asked. 

“We will join your technological research,” Joel replied. 

“’We?’” 

Joel nodded. So did the rest of us. 

“He speaks for you? Very well. Remain, please. The rest of you, go.” 

Guards escorted the others out; I understood their preference. Chemical research, even when on the receiving end of the experimental, was probably less invasive than what we would be subjected to. But Andrew had a thing for technology, and if anyone could get us out it would be him…. Him and a lab (or a body) full of new, untried gadgets. 

She narrowed her eyes. I didn’t like her much, but I wasn’t in a position to be picky. “You five seem to be a bit of a unit,” she said. 

Joel nodded. “We’ve come though it together,” he said. “We’ll stay together.” 

“And should we expect that ‘togetherness’ to lead anywhere destructive?” she asked. 

I was a little surprised at the frankness of her questioning, but then she had just offered to execute anyone who wished it a moment before. I guess nothing should have surprised me by this point. 

Joel looked at us, then back at her. “No,” he said. “We have no one left to fight for and no land to return to. We are of no country. But,” he said, and slowly stood to tower over her, “if you separate us, or threaten undue harm to one of us, the others will act, against you, not your government or your citizens or your country. Just you. Are we clear?” 

She nodded. I thought I detected a little tightening of her jaw, a quick swallow, but she did not call for guards or even step back. “We are. Come with me,” she said. She turned, her heels clicking on the cement floor, and we filed after her on stiff, prickly legs. This was it, I thought. This was the rest of our lives. 

  


We were put in a van and driven to another facility, outside the city limits but within sight of the larger metropolis. Beyond the facility’s wall, open, scrubby hills ran up to the foot of a mountain range tall enough to have snow even now, in the middle of summer. 

The facility itself was a walled compound of a half dozen buildings, most warehouse-like in shape and size- two or three stories tall, but windowless save for small roof-level vents. All were festooned with pipes, power lines and network cables. The wall was patrolled, topped with a mirror assemblage that hinted at a laser array, and even boasted a few strings of razor wire to discourage birds from upsetting any motion sensors. The van was stopped and inspected twice on the approach to the gate, and again once we were inside. The five of us were not restrained, but then that seemed hardly necessary- before entering the van we’d been required to strip completely and don coveralls with electronic patches that gave our name and status to anyone with a higher-ranking broadcast strip on their shoulder, which was everyone including the janitor in this place. 

Another reminder we were not even prisoners, who could serve term and return, or argue for parole. 

Everyone seemed armed, I noticed. Not unusual for a military research facility, but it still seemed… overkill, until Andrew pointed out that every weapon was a little different. Of course, this was a tech research lab. Issuing different weapons to the guards allowed them to gather field data without risking much more than an accidental misfire in target practice. 

I wondered how well we’d be acquainted with those weapons. 

We were led through a series of halls, doors, digital checkpoints and the occasional elevator. I tried to keep track of where in the facility we were but was soon lost. I guessed we were underground, by the chill in the walls and way Hannah had gone white- she didn’t like being underground much and had a better head for spatial reasoning than I did. 

Finally our guards stopped in front of a door with biometric access only. One of them keyed an intercom and another door opened. Someone I guessed was a researcher, a woman with short blond hair and very green eyes, stepped out. She glanced at us. “You must be the new victims,” she said, and grinned. “I’m just kidding.” She crossed to the door and opened it- so it was keyed to her biometrics, not to the guards, I thought. That was interesting. “You five follow me.” 

The guards stayed out. She was brave, or she didn’t know we were considered likely terrorists. 

“This is where you will be staying,” she said. She gestured around the small space, set up as a rather spartan living area. The square room was a bit bigger than the average cell and contained several chairs, a flat-looking couch, and a small table. All light was provided by inset overheads. The chairs were bolted down, as was the table. Three doors opened off the room; one to a small bathroom with nothing but necessities, the other two to bedrooms. One had two beds, the other a pair of bunk beds. Again, everything appeared immovable. 

Like a prison cell, I thought. She knows exactly what we are. 

As if to confirm that thought, she took a box from her pocket and set it on the table. Inside were bracelets, small, silver, unobtrusive. “Take on each,” she said. “Place them around your left wrist.” 

We did so, and they clicked into place. They didn’t seem willing to unclick. 

“These allow us to track more than just movement,” she spoke lightly, as if proud of the gadgets. “We’ll be monitoring and recording heart rate and blood pressure for stress analysis.” She smiled, and the smile seemed genuine enough. “We’re not going to cause you pain or stress, or at least not very much, if we can help it- this will let us get a baseline reading so we know when we’re hurting you.” 

Well, that sounded reassuring. 

“Food will be delivered twice daily through the hatch,” she indicated a small square door midway up the wall. “It will be unlocked for pickup, and locked again after. Please don’t get creative; we don’t like our people to make extracurricular work for themselves, and if you find yourselves board rest assured we can come up with interesting ways of occupying your energy,” she said, and this time there was just a hint of an edge to her voice. “Sleep well; work starts in the morning.” 

She stepped out the door and it slid shut behind her, almost silently. 

We were locked in. 

Joel put his hand on my shoulder and I looked up at him. He pulled Andrew in with the other arm and motioned for the girls to come closer. “We will survive this,” he spoke, low and softly. “We will stay together and we will survive.” 

I made myself breath, made the muscles clenching in my back and belly relax, one after another, until I no longer felt tight as a puffed balloon. Joel was right. We were together. We would survive. Hadn’t we lived through the destruction of our homeland? What worse could they do to us than make us watch that terrible pillar of fire? I slid my arms around Emily’s shoulders and pulled her back against my chest. She reached back and rested her hand against my neck. We would survive. 


	4. Chapter 4

Joel’s first order of business was a room reassignment. We found the bed frames were immobile but the mattresses and bedding were not- one from the double bed room was placed on the floor of the bunk bed room, and all five of us slept in there. Joel had done the same in the processing center, and before that in the mercenary camp- most people thought girls and boys should be housed separately but Joel could be persuasive when it came to housing assignments. Thus far, since leaving home, we had not once slept in separate quarters. 

Not that we slept _together,_ in other senses of the word- Emily and I were in a somewhat exclusive relationship that remained stubbornly undefined and the rest were just good friends, but we had grown up too closely to place a physical pleasure above the need to keep equilibrium, now so more than ever. The five of us had been swimming in the same back-pasture ponds, sleeping in the same hayloft, or on Hannah’s family’s plush couches, or out in my family’s yard under the stars, sharing the same spoon in the ice-cream bucket and cheating off each other’s homework for our entire lives. 

Food, sleep and clean water. They were essentials and we had them. No one talked much. Andrew fiddled with any prospective gadget he could find, from the light switches to the autolocks on the doors and food hatch to the monitor bracelets we wore, until one of them zapped him. He swore at it and gave up for the time being. 

As she had promised, the young female researcher returned approximately twelve hours from when we had seen her last. She entered without announcement, and when she did I realized we had no idea what to call her. There was no name on her unform, though there was a digital readout strip just like ours on the jacket’s upper left breast. I wasn’t close enough to see if she wore contacts but I betted she did- the information on the uniforms was probably a transmission directly to the lenses- without them, we just wouldn’t know. 

Another way of dehumanizing us, I thought. Lab rats, we were tagged and kept in our cages, ready to be picked out when needed and set back down when done. Or expired. 

We followed her to the laboratory, down another set of white-walled halls, and this time I noticed the blank grey panels near doors and hall intersections. I had taken them for biometric scanners but based on the lens hypothesis, they would be other transmission panels, activated by proximity, giving information to those with the proper access but visible only to them. 

We weren’t even allowed to know our own room number. 

She directed us each to a research station complete with white-coated attendants. They wore glasses with obvious transmission/readout capabilities. Understudies? Not yet advanced enough for lenses? I glanced at Andrew and saw him twitch involuntarily towards his station’s computer interface. He looked back at Joel, who shook his head. _Not yet._ Joel probably didn’t think it wise to let the entire facility know about Andrew’s gifts. 

My pair of attendants were about my age, I guessed- university students? They made eye contact, briefly, but their slightly unfocused gazes told me they were seeing the readouts projected on the inside of their glasses more than they saw me. One stepped back and looked me up and down. I wasn’t sure what the purpose was, until I glanced at the computer readout. That readout was a simple digital screen, readable by anyone- and on it was my own body, complete with biometric information. It was a decidedly unclothed image, much to my surprise, as I was definitely wearing clothing. 

I rubbed the fabric between my fingers. Slightly plastic, thin, obnoxiously insufficient for insulation but the room wasn’t cold. Too thin. I hissed through my teeth. I’d heard of fabric being developed for research purposes- certain light wavelengths would pass right through it, allowing it to be rendered transparent to special imaging cameras. 

Cameras like the ones built into the glasses. 

I was not impressed, and from the sound of Hannah’s sudden, harsh outburst across the room from me, neither was she. 

“You have no right,” she snarled. She closed her hand around the attendant’s shirt collar and stood on her tiptoes to bring herself a little closer to eye level. 

“Would you prefer to take off your clothes?” He batted her hand away. “Or just be restrained? Your choice, little lady.” 

She moved to slap him, but he blinked and she stopped, winced, and stepped back. “Bracelets,” she hissed. “They can shock.” 

“I told you that,” Andrew said. “I bet they also have microphones in them.” 

Joel crossed to Hannah’s station. He looked from her to the attendant and back. “Name?” he asked. I noticed he’d dropped his voice- his voice was lower than most people’s but he could put it even deeper, and with a little more volume. People tended to answer him when he talked like that. 

This one was no exception. “Um, Jeremy.” He glanced at his companion. “This is Rachael.” 

“Nice to meet you.” Joel inclined his head just slightly. “I am Joel. These are my friends,” he named us all one by one. “We are here as volunteers. We are as much citizens of this planet as you are, and you would do well to remember.” He put out his hand and Jeremy shook it, probably more by reflex than by intention, but by the sudden slight widening of his eyes I betted Joel had given him a very small demonstration of just how much strength he had in his grip. “Can you describe your research? I am curious to know what projects are currently underway here.” 

Jeremy’s face brightened at that. Trust Joel, I thought. Of course any young person, buried in a rout job in the bottom of a secret facility, would be thrilled to be _asked_ to talk about their work, if they had an ounce of pride in it- and these ones were no exception. 

“We’re working on translating biometric signatures to technological interface.” Jeremy called up the scanned image of Joel. He manipulated it to show a blue diagram of musculoskeletal system and tagged it with the different zones of interest- cerebral and spinal. “We want to make an interface that can use those signatures to control a mechanical device. Think of it like a robotic body-double.” 

Andrew invited himself to the computer and started typing. He was studiously oblivious to Joel’s glare. Jeremy made a noise of protest, then stopped and stared. I had noticed the thin blue gloves the attendants wore but had chalked it up to typical lab protocol; evidently they contained digital fingerprints, because Andrew had gotten himself a pair and was manipulating the readout just fine. “You aren’t allowed to do that,” he said. 

“Oh, let him be,” Rachael retorted. “If he’s that good at it just by watching you, he’ll be better than you by lunchtime.” 

Andrew flashed her a smile and she colored a little. He brought up his own image and tagged it the same way, then started messing with the program’s other functions. It was a basic predict program; with enough baseline information, it could be used to build models of potential technological interface. Everyone had now gathered around the work station, and I could hear the whispers of the attendants. They weren’t sure what to do with the situation- was it a breach of protocol? Was it something they should encourage? 

Oh well, too late now. Andrew was already in. 

He abruptly minimized the predicts program and called up the computer’s code interface. All the flashy, slick graphics vanished in favor of lines of bright numbers and letters. He scrolled, typed, scrolled and typed some more, then brought up the program again. “You have a whole toybox down here,” he said. “What about this?” He manipulated the program to display a human skull and brain, probably his own, and started adding little mechanical bits to it- interfaces with each area of the brain, with a larger gathering of cables at the back of the skull that ended in an external plug. “Look. Someone in your data network already has the design for a right-left hemisphere mimic. They’ve been playing with how the human brain sends signals.” He dropped the program, wrote a few more lines of code, and brought it up again. “That brings their predictions into these ones. The human brain _is_ a computer. You don’t need to build one around it to make it function.” 

“How did you know that’s what we were researching?” Jeremy frowned at him. 

“Your program. It was coded to send all your prediction data to a different program at another workstation titled ‘external computer-brain interface 2.6.’ It won’t work though. The brain is hardwired, not built for wireless send/receive. You’d need a bigger power source for that.” 

“Hey!” One of the attendants shoved his way to the front. “It’ll work!” 

Andrew looked him up and down just as boldly as they’d looked at us. The young man flushed to the roots of his red hair. “What makes you think that?” 

“I made it work!” 

“On yourself.” 

“Well, yes.” 

“You think too loud.” Andrew turned back to the computer. “Look. None of our biometrics work with your machine.” 

I had no idea what the computer was saying, but there were a lot of little red words on the screen. I wondered how Andrew understood what was being said, then realized- of course, this was just a larger application of the biometric key-card technology, meant to interpret the body’s signals instead of just read them like a fingerprint. Technology like this had been in development in Vaamin since long before the war, under media tags like ‘new lease on life for the paralyzed’ and ‘mass mechanical agricultural harvesting.’ Civilian applications for something now so, so obviously military. 

Andrew had been following that research. I could picture the stacks of new tech magazines in his bedroom, though I’d never even thought to leaf through them. My world was elsewhere, out in the dirt and fences of my family’s farm, feeding animals, working harvest cycles and helping my parents decide what to plant where next. 

Now he pulled up the third program, the one he’d been messing with. “Whose is this?” he asked. 

Three girls raised their hands, like school children. 

“Tell me about it,” he said. 

The tallest one spoke first. “ _We_ knew his wouldn’t work, so we’re working on an alternative system. We don’t want it too invasive. Most people don’t want wires in their heads yet.” 

“Though we’ve had some really promising trials with paralysis victims,” another said. She was the shortest, with long black hair and dark eyes. “It definitely works.” 

“I don’t doubt it, but your response time is low, isn’t it?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Why?” 

“Data interpretation,” the middle-height one said. She shouldered her way to the computer and pulled up the full schematic. “We’re using the same right-left program to interpret signals, but even with all the processing power we can give it, there’s still too much lag in the brain sending the signal and the computer knowing what it means.” 

“What are you basing it off? Hypothetical, computer-control signals or physical control signals?” 

“Both,” she answered. “We ask for the typical ‘imagine moving this computerized copy of your arm.’ It works better if they go through sensory transposition exercises first- you know, touch their arm while the computer image gets touched in the same place- but the delay is still evident.” 

“You want it instantaneous?” 

She nodded. The tall girl reached over her and keyed up a new image, this one of a human shape in front of a model mechanical shape. The human moved; the mechanical animal moved. There was a delay, though it was a thousand times faster than I’d expected it to be. It would be leaps and bounds beyond any remote human interface device currently available to the military. Andrew said as much, but she shook her head. 

“We want it to be perfect. Exact movement-for-movement match.” 

Joel reached through them and shut off the computer. There was an instant mass protest from everyone but himself, but he ignored them all. “Why?” he shouted above them. “What’s this for? You aren’t developing farming equipment or walking machines, and you’re beyond the current robotized military technology already. What are you going to do with this once it’s complete?” 

Silence, and a slow, heavy, half-mocking clap. The first female researcher was standing in the doorway, a small, tight smile on her lips. “Congratulations, you found the right question.” She jerked her chin at the back wall, a blank span of pale white luminescent Plexiglas. She made a keystroke on her tablet and it abruptly became transparent. 

I didn’t want to believe what I saw below. I walked over to the window and put my hand against it, reminding myself the barrier was real. Six behemoths, six massive work bays, six sets of cranes and pipes and steel sheets, and crews swarming over them like termites on a broken mound. 

“Welcome to Pantheon,” she said. “We’re building demigods.” 

  


We were back in our own room. I think I blacked out, or at least shut down all but the most necessary human responses. I tended to follow blindly when I needed to think, and I’d been doing some pretty heavy thinking. 

Pantheon. 

Well, that explained where we were. Demigods. Those massive war machines were called demigods. Each had a name- Sleipnir, Gaia, Papillion, Pegasus, Eclipse and Orion, and each a specific role in a battle formation, but to be successful they needed human-fast reflexes and response time. The human brain could, with training, process sensory input extremely fast and the mechanics had advanced to where a combination of electronics and hydraulics could match them, but the signals were the slow point. 

I wondered what all they weren’t telling us. 

We ate in silence. Joel gathered us with his eyes, bringing our attention to his hands, spread flat on the table. He tapped each finger once, then started rhythmically tapping his index finger. After a few taps he switched to the next finger, and so on. It seemed random, until Emily nudged me under the table. I must have looked confused, because she rolled her eyes and grabbed my hand. She tapped lightly inside my wrist, inside the half-circle of tiny scars there, and I caught on. 

Old Earth code, using the same old Earth alphabet everyone had adopted for linguistic standardization. Twenty-six characters, in a series of taps and pauses. We’d learned the code in school as part of our Earth History segment and Joel and Andrew had appropriated it for their own use whenever their parents saw fit to ground them. Having bedrooms facing one another from across a pasture just meant the coded flashlight messages were a little more fun. All five of us had used the code at various times growing up but Hannah and I had fallen out of practice. Now, I only used a remnant of it with Emily, the light tapping on the inside of my wrist, a sequence that I knew spelled out my name even if I’d forgotten the code for each letter. 

Joel used the edge of his fingernail and scraped the skin of his forearm. The letter showed up as a few lines of lightly scratched skin against the dark. He tapped his forefinger beside it- the code for that letter. He repeated, I repeated, and Hannah repeated. Twenty six letters took us most of the night, and the next, and the next, to memorize again, but by then we were able to trade messages just by standing close and fidgeting a little. They were brief, often garbled, but it gave us a way to communicate that was less obviously recorded than speaking or writing. 

For three days all further talk of Pantheon had been put on hold. Instead we’d been subjected to a laundry list of tests, from vision to bloodwork to sampling of spinal fluid. For one rather noxious portion we were put into a cerebral imaging machine and made to answer about three hundred random questions, so the lab children, as we’d come to call them, could create image maps of our thought process and response. Andrew had been banned from touching a computer during that time as well, and he was going stir-crazy. 

We hadn’t ever established if there were cameras in our rooms, so we saved our conversations for after the lights were out. Even a thermal imaging camera would have had trouble picking out the minute finger movements and we were relatively certain they weren’t going that far just to hear what sort of fart jokes Andrew was creating or Hannah and Emily’s long dissertations on the quality of the food. If we really wanted cover for an involved discussion, Hannah would wax poetic about the physical attributes of our lab children. There were a few she wasn’t above flirting with, given the opportunity, and we’d noticed them flushing a bit brighter about the ears the day after such conversations. It gave us all the confirmation we needed- they were recording audio from our rooms. 

On the third night, Joel took my hand and started tapping on the inside of my wrist. _What’s your read?_ He asked. 

I thought for a while. _Children,_ I tapped back. _Little Princess is their boss._ That was the name we’d come up with for the female head researcher, out of lack of anything more definitive. _She’s raised them here._ I’d noticed how the kids moved around the lab space. Most of them wore their glasses, but a few would sometimes push them back on their head. Without them, they could still navigate the lab just fine; they knew what was in each broadcast-tagged drawer without needing the digital readout on the glasses. They knew their way around; one pair of glasses sat gathering dust on the top of a computer interface for two days before its owner sheepishly reclaimed them. (We’d had to physically restrain Andrew from swiping them.) _She cradle-robs. Each is from a different school. Primary school._ I thought back to all the different accents- each of the twelve children sounded a little different, looked a little different. Even after what, five? Six? Years in the facility, they still had distinct mannerisms. 

_Are they allies?_

_Ours? No. They would obey her without question._

_Are we the first?_

I thought about that one. We certainly seemed to be the first they’d researched on, but I couldn’t imagine they would be this far into the Pantheon project, with the demigods mostly built, and not have the simple human bits tried and tested before now. 

_I think…. We’re the first they will put inside._

_Where are the others?_

_Not here._

Of that I was certain. There were references to other projects, nebulous descriptions and a few proud comments, but no specific people were ever spoken of. No use of personal pronouns were ever attached to those past things. 

Which also meant if things were going to fail, they were going to fail on us. 

We were prototypes. 

I said as much to Joel and he nodded, a very tiny movement, hopefully too small for a camera to catch. 

_Disposable,_ he said. 

_Let’s change that._

_They want this to work on their own soldiers._

_They need proof._

He raised one eyebrow, questioning. 

_Funding. We’ll be on parade. Once they prove pantheon is viable and the government buys in, we die._ After all, I thought, we were hardly guaranteed to be on their side. No way they were going to let us actually pilot the demigods, beyond a little demonstration with blank rounds. No live fire in our hands, especially not in front of investors. 

Our success was also our countdown to execution. 

I turned away from Joel and bit down on my wrist hard enough to draw blood, hard enough to puncture the little line of pale scars. I hated this. 


	5. Chapter 5

I also hated waking up unexpectedly. 

Pegasus queried again. _…Status?_ It asked. _Detected pain response. Status normal?_

_No, status not normal! Why didn’t you let me stay under the full twelve hours?!_ I pulled the mask off and spat dried phlegm. 

_Detected pain response._

I looked down at my wrist. The tiny crescent of scars was still visible. It had been an old anxiety-related habit- biting my wrist, forcing myself to breathe slowly and focus on the tactile pain. Maybe not so old a habit as I wanted to pretend. 

I sighed. Enough for today. Maybe Pegasus was right. 

I looked around. No one in sight. I queried for biometric scan; our shed was empty, and no one was trying to tap into our network. Not that Pegasus and I used wireless networks- no, they were never secure enough. I closed my eyes again and told Pegasus to alert immediately if anyone –or their drone or droid or pet dog- came within our perimeter. 

_Ok, Pegasus. Talk to me._

_Define query._

_Talk to me. Use your big boy voice._

_Define query._

_Stop whining. I said big boy voice, or I’m gonna crawl up inside there and drag it out of you._

There was a sound like a sigh through the audio input. _Threats aren’t nice. What do you want to know?_

There, that was the voice I’d been waiting for. _You said you sensed a pain response, but this was from before the memory bank was recording. Where are you pulling that data from?_

_I am extrapolating from more recent memories, Pegasus said. Recorded memories. You bite your wrist- your body knows the pain and draws the association to the memory, even though you have no memory of pain from that exact moment._

Ok, that made sense, I thought. _How exact is your extrapolation?_

_Fairly good. You should know. You helped program it._

Yes, yes I had, but seeing lines of code and having Andrew explain them to me, and having the sensations directly piped into my brain were two very different ways of understanding. _If I query for a deep memory, can you extrapolate full sensation from records on the memory banks? A memory deeper than these._

_How deep?_

_Very deep._

_… Risk is high. I cannot guarantee safety. Greatest danger is in mental avoidance._

_Meaning…?_

_You may lose awareness of the memory completely, by inadvertent choice._

I sighed. So much for that. _Very well. We’ll talk about that another day. Go back to bed, Pegasus._

_… Define query._

_No query. Queue disconnect._

_Disconnect confirmed._

The rush of cold air as the cerebral plug disengaged. The sudden awareness of the now, and all the smells and sensations it contained. The real world called again.   


\---   


I sank into the chair gratefully. Long days were made even longer when I had to deal with them alone. We had agreed to disconnect ourselves completely for at least six hours a day and the colonists felt more comfortable around us when we weren’t festooned with black cords and cables, and so the six hours that were meant to be our rehabilitation time with one another had morphed into our ‘deal with every problem in the new colony’ time. 

The human voice is a beautiful thing, but sometimes it gets awfully old. 

Pegasus didn’t say anything when I plugged in. It didn’t need to- It could sense my desire for a little peace and quiet well enough, and it knew what I wanted. The memory bank opened before me and I settled in for the night.   


\---   


The lab children worked fast. We had been in their care for barely two weeks when they pronounced us ready for the next stage. The first step of this ‘next stage’ was having our heads shaved. Emily couldn’t stop feeling her bare scalp. I leaned over and blew on the top of her head- she squealed and jumped. “Don’t do that!” She said. “It feels weird.” 

“That’s because you’ve never felt wind on the skin of your head,” I said. 

“So it’d be like you shaving your legs?” She asked. 

I shrugged. “Probably.” 

She rolled her eyes. “You should try it some time. I think your leg hair is thicker than my head hair.” 

The five of us had been left to our own devices in the lab (all computers safely shut down, much to Andrew’s disappointment) while the children conferred with their little princess. “I bet they come back with a few markers and a scalpel,” Hannah said. 

“That will come later,” Joel said. “Today will be life-support training.” 

“How do you know?” she asked. 

He smiled a thin smile. “I saw their schedule a few days ago.” 

“Why didn’t you say something?” Emily gave a mock pout. “I wouldn’t have washed my hair this morning if I’d known it was all going to get cut off.” 

The door slid open and the twelve trooped in, their princess following them like a protective hen. “You’re right,” she said, looking at Joel. “We are doing life support training today. Though I’d be curious to know how you got a copy of our schedule,” She eyed him over her tablet. 

He spread his hands, a picture of innocence. “I don’t have a copy, just a memory and a good intuition.” 

“Then let’s get started,” she said. “First things first-“ she started one computer and called up a schematic of the demigods’ core. “When inside, you will be here,” she tapped a human-shaped hollow in the core’s belly. It didn’t look very roomy. “You will be connected to the demigod’s systems via a cerebral plug and a series of spinal interfaces, as well as extremity nodes.” 

“Ah,” Andrew said. I glanced over; he looked decidedly pleased. 

“Yes, you may gloat,” she pointed her stylus at him. “Your suggestion of adding extremity nodes to collect nervous signals cut our response time down to targeted levels. However, this just means you’ll all need a few extra ports and the surgery and recovery is going to take longer than we had anticipated. We’re moving up the schedule and will be rushing the initial life support training. Don’t worry,” she said, looking at us with a little more excitement than I wanted to see, “this is designed to keep you alive, not kill you. And if you do survive it, anyone can.” 

I sighed. I hated being right.   


We were herded into a new room. Most of the room had no floor- it opened into a big pit of faintly pinkish liquid that looked a bit thick for water. The children handed us each a mask-shaped object with some protrusions on the inside and told us to put them on. We did so, though not without a fair bit of protesting and gagging. The protrusions were meant to sit just at the back of the throat, right where I didn’t want _anything_ to touch, and it took me several tries before I could hold it there without gagging around it. Then we were each handed a rather heavy weight with a little shackle device that closed over our wrists. 

I did not like where this was going. 

“Either jump or we push you,” the princess said. 

Hannah glared over the top of her mask. She hoisted her weight and cannonballed in, sinking immediately to the bottom. I watched her thrash and struggle against the weight for only a moment before two of the children seized my shoulders and tipped me far enough to overbalance. I hit the water and gasped- the mask had the effect of keeping airways open- and now the liquid was inside my mouth and my lungs. I panicked, fighting to get the weight, and myself, above the liquid but I could not budge it from the pool’s floor, not even setting my legs against the floor and levering with all my strength. 

Magnetic, I thought. Must be. 

I gasped again and a fresh wave of liquid hit my lungs. 

I wasn’t dead yet. 

Breathing was painful and quite a chore, but it was possible. 

I’d heard of breathable liquids used for some forms of space travel, and there were rumors of a colony on a water planet that lived entirely within a liquid-filled dome, but I’d never expected to be introduced to it quite like this. 

I felt the weight release from the floor. They must have turned off the magnetism, I thought. I picked it up and kicked myself to the surface, tearing off the mask as I went. I tossed it and the weight on the pool’s edge and vomited up what of the liquid was left in my lungs and stomach. Somewhat gleefully I aimed for the princess’s feet. 

She jerked back and glared at me. I shrugged and held up my wrists, still in their manacles. Blood from the cuts I’d inflicted in my panic was running down my forearms and dripping from my elbows. 

One of the children opened them for me and made vaguely sympathetic noises. I didn’t care. I leaned back against the pool’s edge and closed my eyes, just glad to breathe more easily. Just because it was possible to breath underwater doesn’t mean the body’s built for it, and much longer would have been impossible, oxygenated liquid or no. 

Joel was playing the stoic, but I could tell he wasn’t happy. At least he’d managed to avoid shredding his wrists. Andrew had slung himself over Joel’s shoulder, evidently too spent to be angry. Hannah was chasing a boy around the edge of the pool, weight in one hand and mask in the other. If he let himself get caught I knew where he was going. Emily was sitting on the pool’s edge, shivering. 

I swam over to her and levered myself out. “You ok?” I asked. She shook her head. “Me neither.” 

She looked down at my wrists and her eyes widened. “It’s ok,” I said. “The water makes it look worse than it is.” 

Her fingers closed around my hands and I felt her begin to tap, on the inside of my palm. We’d never tried talking so close to the children, but I didn’t have the heart to pull away. 

_I hate them,_ she said. 

I leaned my forehead against hers. _I do too._   


Joel had been silently furious when he saw our condition. He carried Andrew back to our quarters himself, not letting the children touch him. Emily, Hannah and I followed, still dripping wet. For a five minute exercise, we were more tired than we’d been after a full day of the mercenary physical drills. 

But it didn’t end there. 

We were made to repeat the water breathing exercise every morning for five mornings in a row. After the first morning they added a new mechanic to the masks- an auto-breather and a tiny pump that forced the liquid in and out at a set rate. Much as I hated not being able to control my breathing it did help with the anxiety and I managed to not hurt myself again. 

That was the point, they told us. Our bodies had to learn to relinquish certain physical controls. They lengthened the time of the exercise by a little each day too. By the last day, I considered dragging the princess in with me just to see how she liked it. 

I wondered what else they wanted to control. 

We were also started on a chemical drip designed, they told us, to acclimatize our systems to the biomechanical parts that would be installed soon. 

Then they started drawing on us. Little dots, little diagrams, showing what would go where. 

Andrew was too tired from the water exercises to be happy about it. He was becoming increasingly lethargic, much to Joel’s concern.   


The children explained the surgeries to us- each one designed to implant a little more of the structural biomechanical components that would eventually allow us to interface with the demigods. We’d already been assigned our machine, as they were unique in design. I looked down at the second bracelet on my wrist, at the letters on it. Pegasus. Tagged as its property. We still didn’t know much about the demigods, though after the implants were in place we hoped that might change. I knew Pegasus was not the biggest but not the smallest, not the slowest, but not the fastest. And unlike its namesake, it could not fly. 

Despite the deep revulsion to what I knew it would entail, I was looking forward to getting up in the big machine and seeing what it could do.


	6. Chapter 6

  
  


The day before the first surgery, we were brought from our quarters and led down a new hall- we were all a bit keyed up, wondering what new odd torture they had devised 

We followed down the hall; I was somewhere in the middle of the line, and the child in front of me gestured into a room that opened off the hall. Without thinking, I obeyed, and the door shut behind me. 

I froze. 

The room was paneled with luminous white walls, floor to ceiling. There was no direct source of light, just the soft glow. There was also no sound except my own breathing and heartbeat. 

And none of the others were in this room. 

I could feel my chest beginning to constrict. I swallowed, but it only made the feeling worse and gave way to a rising nausea. None of the others were in sight. 

I hadn’t noticed, but until now we’d always been in the same place at the same time. We’d taken it as a given that we’d go through all of this together and come out of it together, alive or dead. 

And now I was alone. 

I bit my wrist, hard enough to taste blood, and forced myself to breath. Forcing air around the skin was nigh as hard as breathing under that oxygenated liquid. 

_Stop._ I closed my eyes. _Stop. Think of them. You know who they are now. Where are they? What are they doing?_

Joel had set me to my task a hundred times before. Observe- see and know- and figure out why people did what they did. I’d figured out the princess and the children. I knew where they were. 

Those walls were as clear to their eyes as the very clothing we wore. They were right there, in front of me, watching me panic. 

I released my wrist and wiped the blood from my mouth. The pain had done its job; I still had some dignity left. What about the others? 

Joel would be sitting crosslegged in the middle of his cubicle, staring at a wall with enough intensity to bore holes in it, waiting. No one had ever beaten him in a staring contest and I couldn’t imagine the princess having more patience than he did, not with the way she’d been whining about her time tables and data lately. 

Andrew was already asleep. When he got scared, or bored, or just ran out of interesting things to think about, he fell asleep. We’d ended many a game of hide and seek by finding him curled up in the seat of someone’s car or at the top of a hay loft, snoring away, just waiting for us to finally show up. 

Emily would pace. She’d walk slowly, hands in her back pockets, finding all sorts of nonexistent details to examine. She’d tap the walls, sniff the corners, fiddle with her shoe laces, and in general confuse her audience into writing her off as a harmless, if a bit dense, child. She had a good act- very, very few people back home knew she was as brilliant as that- but her head would be in other places. She, like me, liked to understand people. She could predict. While I knew why they did what they did, she knew what they wanted to see next. 

And Hannah… well, Hannah would be shattering glass with her well-practiced dictionary of profanity, delivered to every child by name. She was the only one of us who had bothered to learn everyone’s names, bribed out of them by casual flirting and a soft-eyed glance- though not even she knew the princess’s name. She could be scathing with her words, but she could make them soft as velvet and warm as sunshine when she chose. She’d been trained for the high-money circles of her parents’ friends, and while her casual swearing was a private rebellion, her talent for bending people’s will to her own was still very strong. 

I knew they were right there, staring at me, collecting their data, measuring my heart rate and sweat and probably brain waves by now, but I didn’t care. I brought my other wrist up to my face- the wrist containing those two little silver bracelets, and closed my teeth around the first one. I liked the one that said Pegasus. I wanted to keep that one- but the first bracelet- the one that tracked my movements and zapped me if I didn’t pay attention and probably recorded everything I said, that one could go. 

I couldn’t bite through it- no, the metal clicked against my teeth and hurt- but I wanted to see what they would do. I worried at it a little, just gently chewing, and was rewarded by a rather painful shock to the inside of my mouth. 

Good. I’d made them interact with me. 

I smiled at the blank white wall. 

Then I started moving the bracelet, nice and slimy with my own saliva, carefully down over my hand. It was a trick I’d perfected after my one run-in with our local law enforcement back in Neartree. I didn’t much like one of the men on the police force, and he didn’t much like me, and the one time he caught me in the wrong spot at the wrong moment he’d taken the opportunity to cuff me to a fence and leave me to sit for a while. 

For most of the night, in a thunder storm, in pouring rain. I’d very nearly gone hypothermic before Joel found me and cut the cuffs off. 

After that I’d gotten Joel to lend me a pair of cuffs and practiced getting out of them. Modern cuffs didn’t have locks that could be picked, but they did tend to make a circle around one’s wrist just like the old ones. And circles could be slipped through, with the right incentive and a little pain tolerance. 

I had incentive, and I had pain tolerance to spare. 

The bracelet zapped me again, but I didn’t let go. I’d been hurt worse by that horrid underwater breathing exercise; indeed, that’s what had set me to planning this little stunt. The children and their princess liked playing games with restraint, be in names, bracelets, biolocked doors, or lack of privacy. I wanted –no, I needed- to prove to them and to myself that this ended now, or I’d be having nightmares about being chained to the bottom of the pool and cutting off my own hands to escape for the rest of my life. 

I got the bracelet worked well over the joint of my thumb. I slid my tongue along it and it went a little further. I was deliberately playing it longer- once it was over the thickest bit with only a little pinching and loss of skin, the rest would be child’s play- but I won’t deny a bit of the theatrical got to me and I made it a show. 

Finally I drew the thing off over my fingers and toyed with it there, all teeth and fingers and just enough blood to show, before spinning it and letting it drop. 

Then I set my heel on it. I couldn’t really destroy it, but the idea was reasonably symbolic. 

I don’t know who I was gloating at- maybe just the empty air above their heads- but I really hoped _someone_ had seen it. 

  


Someone had. 

The door behind me hissed open and I was called out of the cubicle. The princess herself was there, and she was not happy. “Give me one good reason not to have you cut up for spare parts,” she said, and her voice was very brittle. 

I looked her in the eye- something I hadn’t done much of- and I smiled, all teeth. “You can’t afford to field just four of your toys. You need at least five to prove your formation works, and without a driver for Orion I’m your only mid-weight. You can’t run a formation with just a base, a battery, an artillery and a spy. You need a tank, and that means you need me.” I leaned a little closer, ignoring the sudden movements of the children to block me. I was taller than them. “You need all of us. You’re so close to being shut down, this is your last effort. When’s the big party? Tomorrow? A week? You’ve got the ax just over your head, don’t you?” 

I looked over her shoulder; Joel, Hannah and Emily were there, shepherded into the conversation by their oblivious attending children. Andrew was propped up between them, still wiping his eyes and yawning. Joel caught my eye. I raised one eyebrow- should we continue?- he nodded. Now or never, I thought. We’d planned on pushing our weight at some point, rather after the surgery than before it, as by then we would be at our most indispensable, but now that we’d gotten started… 

“Kire didn’t annex Izos and Vaamin for their pretty sunsets,” Joel said. 

The princess whirled. 

“The current biotechnology field requires a lot of rarer minerals, doesn’t it?” I said. 

Hannah made her best imp face. “Yeah, like those nice coastal countries have. Too bad our government didn’t want yours in mucking up our best land for mines, and charging ten times as much as you could make on the gamble this technology might actually work.” 

“Oh yes, come to think of it,” Emily put her forefinger on her chin and walked around the princess to stand beside me, “the core hasn’t approved this yet, have they?” She gave a slow wink. “Well, I won’t tell if you won’t, but you might want to at least forge a core stamp on your blueprints before that big launch and funding gala you’ll be hosting a few weeks from now.” 

“How did you…?” one of the children asked. 

Andrew yawned with all the arrogance of a barn cat. “Ten rolls of black rubberized carpet. Six sets of outdoor false torch lights. Fifteen galaxy granite tables. Seventy-two different bottles of wine. What passes for high culture food on a dozen planets. Not to mention pristine new suits for everyone here.” He blinked sleepily. “What, you’ve been organizing that list for three days. I don’t need your souped-up little lenses to read basic receipt text.” 

Joel gently moved the group along until we were back in the home lab, with a little more breathing space than the cramped hallway. He approached the princess and she very nearly backed away. I could tell she wanted to- I almost felt sorry for her. She’d staked everything on this and she really didn’t know what to do now. 

He offered her his hand. “Hello. My name is Joel. Joel Neartree, new citizen of Kire. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.” 

She looked at him, down at his hand, and back to him. Her face turned several interesting colors of red and white. It was a little nice to see her struggle to control her breathing just as much as we had during her experiments. Then she swallowed what must have been a very large lump in her throat and took his hand. 

“Thank you, sir.” She looked at him, pale, trembling just a little, terrified and hating it. She breathed and I watched, fascinated, as her mask slid back on. When she spoke, her voice was pure business and solid as iron. “As you know, our work is of a somewhat delicate nature and requires a… discretionary touch. We are nearing completion of Pantheon and our demigod-class tanks, but we depend on the partnership of _all_ our team members. Our team strives to set aside its political differences in favor of placing O-076 on the galactic map as the forerunner of biotechnological innovation; this goal is within our grasp. Should you choose to support us, I can guarantee your legacy will never be forgotten.” 

“Well spoken.” Joel crossed his arms and seemed to consider for a moment. “I am looking to invest an asset decidedly more personal than pure funds. What is money but numbers these days?” He smiled. “I am prepared to pledge this asset –my family- to Pantheon but due to events outside our control we have been robbed of name and heritage. I will need a promise, on goodwill if it must be, that you will care for my family as if it were your own.” 

“Should I extend this promise, what can I expect in return?” she asked as if Joel were offering a cargo of raw ore. 

“Cooperation, teamwork,” he replied. “A deliberate setting aside of all this political nonsense and a dedicated pursuit of a common goal. We too are of O-076. The future of our planet is, as you say, ‘within our grasp.’ Let us reach out and take it together.” 

  


“What was the purpose of that test?” I asked the lab child as she dotted my wrists with antibiotic ointment. 

She looked up at me. “We noticed you five are never apart. You even all sleep in the same room. Half the time you’re touching someone. We wanted to see what would happen if we isolated you.” 

“What did the results tell you?” 

“That you are prone to anxiety but tend to make decisions independent of the group, if you have to.” She raised his wrist to level with her eyes and scowled at the bite mark. “You do that a lot, don’t you?” 

“More than I should.” I shrugged. “It’s an old habit.” 

“Is escaping a cuff a habit too?” 

“More like a hobby. How did the others do?” 

She glanced at Joel. “He sat perfectly still the entire time, staring right at us. I don’t know how he knew where we were; you can’t see out of those rooms. It was pretty creepy. He fell asleep,” she indicated Andrew with her chin. “The girls surprised us. She just paced around and inspected the room, had no problems at all, but Hannah sang.” 

I laughed. Of course, Hannah’s was the name they knew. They’d been instructed not to use our names to refer to us, as we were not to use theirs, but Hannah had made herself an exception to that. She also had a voice that rivaled most operatic singers in volume, if not nearly in quality. Her parents had invested in vocal training for her years ago and while she hated formal singing, she loved that she could make lots of very loud noise very, very well. I wished I could have seen her belting out her favorite ballad at the top of her rather strong lungs. Knowing her, she’d done it with the bracelet and its tiny microphone right in front of her mouth. I wondered if the darn thing still worked. 

I hoped no one would replace mine. 

The lab child read my mind. She dangled a new bracelet in front of my face. “Can I convince you to keep it on?” 

“No.” 

“I can make it much tighter than the last one.” 

I looked down, then looked at her, side-eyeing, in what I hoped was a somewhat mysterious way. “Have you ever heard the story of the fox and the trap? It’s an old farmer’s tale about a man who sets a trap for a fox who steals eggs from his chicken coop. He waits and waits and finally one night the fox steps into the trap and is caught.” I closed my forefinger and thumb around my wrist, where the bracelet had been. “But when he goes to the trap to kill the fox, he sees it doing something strange. Unable to bite through the iron trap, the fox is chewing off its own foreleg. Finally it bites through the bone and frees itself, preferring to run on three legs and live to accepting death on all four.” 

She blushed rather strongly. I didn’t mind- she had a good complexion for blushing. More importantly, she set the bracelet down. “You think we’d kill you if you didn’t cut off your own hand?” she asked. 

“If that’s what stood between my family and our lives. Between us all, I’m sure one single hand would go unnoticed.” 

“You aren’t going to die.” 

“Not today, and not by you,” I said. “But someday I will. And probably when _she_ decides it. Don’t forget- those bracelets are just for your convenience.” I reached across my chest and touched the little hard ridge of the scar on my shoulder from the kill-switch chip buried there. “Your people have other ways of dealing with us.” 

She didn’t answer that one. I knew she knew about the chip, but she didn’t bring up the bracelet again. 

  


That evening, Andrew and Emily managed to slip their bracelets as well. Andrew kept his around, for entertainment, he said, but Emily tossed hers down onto the table and glared at it. 

“Now all we need is clothing impenetrable to their glasses and I’ll start to feel human again,” she said. 

I slid myself a little closer to her. “There are a few among them who could use a lesson in basic humanity.” 

“Or we could just steal their cloths and make them wear these,” Hannah quipped. She plucked at the thin synthetic material. To us, it was as opaque as any normal cloth but I couldn’t shake the image of myself on that computer screen, and knowing they could see us like that any time they wished with the light polarizing technology in the glasses… it still made my blood run cold. Just because we had all seen one another didn’t mean I wanted anyone else to. 

Especially not Emily. 

“Sleep now,” Joel said. “I think tomorrow may be a very long day.” 

We agreed. I traced the little line of black ink dots down my forearm- where the biomechanical interface would rest under the skin- tomorrow we would go under the knife. After that, there would be no escape. 

  


That night, Emily and I shared a bed. I had considered making that next step between us, so simple a thing it seemed now, after so many days spent sleeping merely inches from one another, but I’d also noticed a disturbing lack of response in my own body to such a suggestion. She had too, and though we felt comfort in the closeness there was… disappointment on both our parts when it became clear we wouldn’t be able to act on what once would have been a deep, shared desire. Was it something in the food? Something in the chemical drip they’d had us all on for days now? I didn’t know and probably never would. 

I wondered if the effect would wear off or if we’d be like this forever, bound up in mutual desire but forever forbidden from a biological union. Or, after tomorrow, would we still be human enough to want sex? 

  
  



	7. Chapter 7

  
  


Morning came too soon. 

We were herded into a new room, a surgery prep room. Five steel-railed beds. Five sets of life support systems. 

Five racks of biomechanical interface parts. 

I made myself breath. 

Joel’s hand was firm on my shoulder. I turned. He took my wrist and tapped, twice, inside the circle of the bite mark. 

I nodded. I was alright. I could make it through this. 

I knew I had him beside me. Him, and Hannah and Emily and Andrew. 

  


“When you regain consciousness, you will be inside the demigods’ life support systems. The transition will be easier to complete there, rather than through a second process,” the princess said. She nodded to her children and they activated IV drips. 

I remember her saying something more, then nothing. 

No pain. 

There are worse things than pain. 

  


I woke in darkness, and the darkness washed over me like a familiar breath. My skin shivered and flushed under its touch. 

When people think of darkness, they think of ‘night,’ or ‘sleep,’ or ‘having your eyes closed.’ This darkness is different- it’s an absence of everything, not just light. 

No smell. No _feel._ Nothing at all. 

I sighed. 

_Pegasus, am I still dreaming or is this now?_

_Archives activated. This is now. Permission required to continue._

_You still think I’m going to hurt myself, don’t you?_

_Probability of trauma high._

_Why? Big boy voice, Pegasus._

_…. There are memories you requested hidden from you. If you continue, it is inevitable you will encounter them._

_I remember requesting to forget things, but I don’t remember forbidding myself from ever going back._

_I don’t want you hurt._

Well, there it was. I sighed. Pegasus was sentient, in its own way- the others always insisted it was just the copy of my own mind talking back at me, saying the things I would say to myself in a mirror, as their machines did- but Pegasus sometimes said things I didn’t want to hear, or deep down didn’t want to admit that I did want to hear. 

_Put me back down, Pegasus, or I’ll use Eclipse._

_… Trauma likely. Warning delivered._

_Don’t get snide. You can say you told me so all you like after we finish. Not before. And from here on out, unless I’m actually dying, don’t you dare pull me out before the timer goes off._

Pegasus didn’t answer. I don’t know if someone entered our radius, or if it finally decided to shut up and cooperate. Either way, I felt myself sinking back into the senseless darkness, deep into dream and memory- 

  


\--   


-And terror. 

Abject terror. I tried to fight, I tried to scream, but nothing happened. Not the smallest twitch. I should have felt my teeth click together but I couldn’t feel teeth. I couldn’t feel _anything._ It was gone. My mind was alone in empty darkness. 

They lied, I thought. They lied. They’ve killed us. This cannot possibly be life. 

Alone. _Alone._ No voice, no others. I could have stood it if I'd been able to hear them, feel them, know they were there. I could have been a head in a jar, a brain in a cold-storage box, a code imprint in a machine. 

Slowly, very slowly, I began to feel the cold. My mind grasped the cold and clung to it, any physical sensation in that darkness. 

Cold of metal, cold of a deep, dark place buried under a mountain of steel and electronics, not yet warmed by its own engines and sunlight. 

_“Are you awake?”_

I shivered. A voice, and I was still without a physical body. 

_“Calm down. You’re fine. We just took your sensory perception off line for a bit. You’ll thank us later. It actually speeds up healing nicely- keeps your head out of the way, so to speak. I’m going to open a visual pathway now. Concentrate on what you see inside your head.”_

A window of light, like the after-image from seeing the sun, appeared before me. Slowly it came into focus- a white room, the laboratory, all twelve lab children at their stations, the princess’s face hovering before mine. 

_“Concentrate on mental vocalization. That’s how you communicate,”_ she said. 

I wanted to ask just how she expected me to talk if she’d paralyzed me. 

She smiled, a small, impish, superior smile. _“You can imagine biting things all you like; you can’t hurt yourself like this.”_

_“The next thing I sink my teeth into won’t be me,”_ I retorted. Ah, that was how it was done. 

_“Welcome to the civilized world, Pegasus.”_ I could see her typing- the visual feed must be through a computer camera, I thought. Convenient. I wondered if I could see anything else. 

I mentally backed away from that window and shuffled around a bit inside the darkness. There were other pathways. I found several of them, linked to as of yet inoperational cameras. I wondered if the others were online yet- only one way to find out, I thought. 

She’d addressed me as Pegasus. I was inside Pegasus, inside its life-support core. On a thought, I queried for an audio channel to Sleipnir. 

It worked. A little box of blue computer text hovered in my peripheral vision, stating contact was possible. 

_“Joel, you awake?”_ I asked. 

_“Yes; we all are.”_

_“Did I oversleep?”_

_“By a bit, yes,”_ a new audio channel came through, tagged as Gaia. That would be Hannah, I thought. 

_“Glad you’re all still friends,”_ the princess said. Her audio/ocular feed took priority, I noticed. I’d have to do something about that as soon as I knew how. 

I pushed her screen down as far as it would go and brought up a false-visual of the others. I found the mechanics of the mental space were intuitive, remarkably so- nothing at all like the clumsy pseudoreality computer programs built for games and long-distance communications. I tagged each feed a different color and sound, and tagged Joel’s as top priority. The others would be more talkative, but I wanted to know exactly what he said, when he said it- it was rather more likely to be important. 

The princess said something else about safety, physical movement trials, and the demigods’ external cameras. I brought up her feed again and queried for a text of her dialog. It was presented, very nicely, in type, with a foot note that the audio/ocular was on record and could be reviewed at any time. 

I could get used to this. 

I queried for physical awareness next. If I was inside Pegasus’ core, I was expected to move the mountain of metal as an extension of myself. I couldn’t feel my body at all; undoubtedly it was still healing from the biomechanical implantation, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t use it. 

_“Pegasus, stop it.”_ That was the princess again. I glanced at her feed and ignored her. 

A tiny shock, a little red flash of warning, and my mind instinctively backed away from what it had been doing. 

Seems I’d acquired a new bracelet. 

_“You’ll have a little more trouble getting rid of that one,”_ she said. _“Now be a good boy and listen when I’m speaking to you. This is important.”_

_“I’m sure,”_ I said, and went back to probing for control. The faster I knew how to manipulate the tank, the greater my chances of survival. In all our projections, this was the most dangerous time. We’d succeeded, so therefore we would die. 

_“I’m not going to hurt you,”_ she said. 

_“That doesn’t mean you won’t leave us disembodied heads in the back of a lab,”_ I spat back. 

_“Yes, it does.”_ She sounded tired. _“Your fearless leader has my signature on a contract stating you five are to be granted all citizen rights of Kire, in exchange for your continued cooperation. You will not be harmed. You will not be disembodied either.”_

_“I know you planned for it,”_ Emily said. 

_“Was it going to be a convenient mechanical failure?”_ Hannah asked, _“Or lethal injection while we slept?”_

The princess whirled on her. Hannah had been a bit too accurate, I think. I didn’t hear their exchange- Andrew’s feed flashed across my vision. _“Pegasus, hang on. I’m sending you the physical awareness package I made for the others.”_

I felt the stream of data downloaded via a cable plugged into a little access port just behind Pegasus’ right elbow. I shivered, and a thousand tiny metal scales softly rustled- articulated solar panels down the demigod’s spine. The little red warning was back, but this time it didn’t sting so much. Andrew’s patch included a block against it. So much for her new security bracelets. 

_“What are you playing at now, Eclipse?”_ The princess’s feed flashed above his and the data stream was disconnected, but the damage was done. He recoiled in a perfect picture of chastised curiosity. 

_“Just visiting,”_ he said. _“You can’t blame a guy for wanting to check out his friends’ digs now, can you?”_

She glared but did not pursue the line of inquiry. _“Take some time to familiarize yourselves with the audio/ocular functions. Tempting as it is, leave physical awareness and activation alone for now. You’re all chained down in the warehouse and I don’t want you hurting the mechanics or tearing my lab apart before we get full funding.”_ Her feed went dark. 

I supposed she must have signed off, and I was a bit glad. Her mask was slipping again. I liked her better as a cold, predictable cyborg. Her as a tired, peevish human female was… annoying. I didn’t want to admit it but the dehumanization process was quite double-edged. 

_“Joel, did you really get a signature from her?”_ Emily asked. 

_“Yes. I woke up a little earlier than the rest of you and we had a nice chat. I had her draw up a contract and sign it in front of all her lab children and the mechanics here. I don’t know how binding it is, but we’re alive longer than I thought we’d be. And she shouldn’t be able to kill us openly.”_

I could sense the relief in his voice. I closed my eyes –or at least my mental perception of my eyes- and all audio/ocular was cut off. I didn’t need a physical body to feel a sudden release of tension from my mind- from my shoulders. We were free, for a little while at least. The ax had been raised, if not yet set aside. 

_“Who are the mechanics?”_ I asked. Outside of the lab we hadn’t met anyone but the nonspeaking guards. 

_“Here,”_ Hannah sent over a data feed. A list of names and photos scrolled past- all the mechanics who had worked on the Pantheon project machinery. That could be quite valuable. I wondered how she’d gotten ahold of it. 

_“what happens now?”_ Emily asked. 

_“We do as she suggested,”_ Joel replied. _“We need a better form of communication. Andrew?”_

There was a short, universal silence. 

Then Andrew smirked. “How’s this?” he asked. 

We all gaped- it was his voice, spoken directly to us, it seemed, not through an audio/ocular data feed. “Oh?” Joel sounded pleased. “Is it safe?” 

“Nope, but it’s more convenient. The ocular feed was cumbersome because it’s going through a wireless server somewhere in the lab. I hijacked one of the maintenance cables for this- we’re all still hardwired to their temporary server. Think of it like a mental telephone. It’s voice only. It was meant to carry voice commands from the construction crews.” 

“Ah. That would make sense.” Joel sounded very pleased. I heard something shift outside Pegasus. “External cameras online,” he said. “Oh, this is quite a sight.” 

He sent his ocular data to us; he was right. Sleipnir was a heavyweight tank and its gun platform, or ‘head,’ was taller than myself or Eclipse. His core looked tank-like, but the gun platform was on an articulated base that could arch, horse-like, to shoot straight up, down, or any angle between; he also boasted a full eight legs, four jointed legs with the lower half boasting caterpillar crawlers, able to fold and become standard tank propulsion, and four with grapplers on the ends, for all-terrain stability, I assumed. 

I was of the same design, but smaller and lighter and in place of the extra legs I had ‘wings,’ a set of shield panels I could move up and down to shield my back or belly as necessary. Useful, I thought, especially in a mixed company. I could shield ground troops and provide cover for return fire. The panels were also festooned with the same tiny articulated solar cells as my spine; I could recharge by orienting them towards the sun. I queried for the length of time required to recharge and was pleasantly surprised to find a day of standing in full sunlight would recharge the batteries. I also had access to liquid fuel and could harvest organic material for combustion, in an emergency, though the resulting carbon buildup would be troublesome to clean. I too had a rail-gun for a head and a neck that articulated. I itched to arch it and prance like a pony but I didn’t want to let on that we were gaining control over the demigods. 

Papillon took her name from the arrangement of solar panels on her back- much larger than mine- spread like the wings of a butterfly to catch sunlight. She was slender in build, with long legs and a compact head boasting a small bristle of light artillery. She could not fly, but I betted she could glide fairly well. I queried for a spec report and it came, nicely packaged with data on what weapons went where for all of us. I was fairly certain I wasn’t supposed to have it, so I shuffled it off into a safe corner of the mental map and sent copies on to the rest. Papillion, I noticed, had energy weapons that the rest of us did not. Her artillery included microwave weapons and a rather powerful laser, built for targeting tanks and ships. It would cause the hull to heat enough to lose structural integrity. 

I hoped that laser would never get pointed my direction. 

Eclipse’s spec report and visual data were hard to read. He was a spider-shaped ball of technical data, all radar shields, joints and data banks. No wonder he’d been able to open communications with us; he was built to be the perfect spy, able to infiltrate both physically and electronically. I won’t pretend I understood any of what I read on his spec report- but it sounded right up his alley. 

Gaia, Hannah’s beast, was massive. I did not understand what I was seeing until I overlaid the visual image with the schematic; she was festooned with solar panels as well, with a massive undercarriage and set of caterpillar treads on short, squat pillar bases, capable of full articulated movement. She was a starfish, I thought- she could move in any direction, without a set ‘head’ or ‘tail,’ as we had. 

Then I started reading the names on the diagram. 

Someone had a cruel sense of humor. 

Gaia was a mobile solarfrac. She was fortified with the same energy weapons as Papillion, and in addition had a prism structure that allowed her to focus and emit visible light at great intensity, effectively blinding any heat/light sensors in her vicinity. She could also provide energy elsewhere- there were charging stations around her perimeter. We could go to her for power if we were running low. 

The beauty of a solarfrac was its independence to visible light. It could pick up enough background radiation to be an efficient source of power regardless of direct sunlight, though sunlight made the process faster. Sunlight, plus water, plus organic material, equaled a host of different fuel compounds. She could even produce purified water and organics for human consumption, making her the core and shield of a mixed-unit force. 

This was Pantheon, I thought. 

We were the next step in military technology. 

The only thing missing was Orion, the ground-to-air defense. Orion’s schematic was incomplete, as was the big, lonely tank itself. No driver, no computer, not even all its panels and guns, but if ever completed it could bring down a space ship- our rail guns were small, simple affairs, capable of punching through ground units with a vengeance, but Orion’s schematic called for a rail gun up its spine, the ‘bow’ of the warrior, that could pierce even the armored hide of a descending drop-ship. 

There were laws about things like us. Laws that forbid anything near this level of weaponry on ground-based units. Laws written during the Hundred World War, enforced by the Core planets, designed to prevent another interplanetary conflict on that scale. Wars weren’t supposed to cross the space/atmosphere border anymore. Conflict wasn’t permitted to grow to a point where it might endanger habitable land. And building a railgun on a ground tank specifically for hulling a space ship violated those laws letter and spirit. 

I grew cold. Maybe it was residual feeling of the metal I knew encased my body. But I think it was realization of what we were playing with, and how if this all went wrong, it wouldn’t be the princess we’d have to worry about, it’d be the entire rest of the galaxy. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh gosh apparently I didn't understand the concept of Character Voice in 2013. Kevin has _none._ and poor Emily. Girl I will make you a personality next time I promise. And Kevin would have such a strong narrative voice too! Farm kid, terrified of being alone, very kinetic, interacts very physically with his people and environment, used to being outside 90% of the time and is now stuck inside- he'd be going through sunlight withdrawal, itching to go do things and be productive with his hands, clingy with all his people, and mourning the loss of his parents and their farm with all the sweat and blood his family has poured into making it productive. Lost opportunity there, self. Next time. (He needs a new name.) I tend to name characters with stand-in handles that I can remember easily, then change them all on a later rewrite. These are all still first-generation names. I'm trying to not cheat and just upload this with as little retouching, grammar/spelling aside, as possible, but I am adding a few lines here and there to unsnarl some continuity issues and make good on little bits of narrative foreshadowing.


	8. Chapter 8

  
  


I woke, surprised that I had been asleep- I could not remember drifting off, but I had a sense that I had. I was still inside Pegasus, evidenced by the nice little readout of my own physical state. Now, I also had an index of what my body was doing and a query for reconnecting to physical awareness. 

I accepted, and appreciated that pain signals were still blocked. My limbs felt iron-heavy, cold and numb, and I could not move them. I could feel the edges of the mask biting into my face and the warm, damp air pressed in and drawn out of my lungs, rhythmically. Something in my skull felt heavy and there was a faint throbbing- I was scared to think what the actual assembly in my head looked like. 

The audio/ocular feed pinged. I accepted the query and our little princess’s picture appeared. 

“Good morning!” She said. She looked a bit better than she had the day before- I guessed we’d all slept well. “How are you feeling today?” 

I glanced around- the others had opened channels as well, and the five of us were now arrayed as a series of little glowing windows sharing one another’s digital space. The princess, fittingly, was before and a little above us. 

None of us answered her, but I don’t think she expected us to. She went through the motions of shuffling some papers on her desk- a nice deception, since I hadn’t seen her touch actual paper since we’d arrived. “Today we will work on movement signals, _after_ we get you all out of doors. She grinned, a bit cat-like. “Do try not to bump into one another. You were rather expensive to put together, and we wouldn’t want any scratches on the new paint now, would we?” 

There was a clanging, jarring sound from somewhere behind me; I wanted to turn and _look,_ but helpfully the viewscreen slid sideways as different cameras came into play and I could see the big doors scrolling back. Beyond was sunlight, bright sunlight, and yellow-tan scrub desert and bright blue sky. 

I wanted to run into it. I wanted to throw myself into the dirt and just smell, and feel, and _be,_ back in that world again. The machine around me shivered, in anticipation, I think- feeding off my nervous energy. 

The princess was going through the motions of handing control over to us, but I think she knew by now we had taken the bit in our teeth. I heard the word to go, and I went. 

Backwards first, backing out of the narrow construction bay. I swung my head, mindful of the construction cranes, and turned, clumsy, clunking into things I hoped weren’t too important. One foot, I thought. Then the next. Forefoot. Hind foot. Just like riding a horse. 

I tried to envision the feel of a four-legged creature under me, which shoulder moved when and what that would look like. I stumbled to the great bay doors and finally put Pegasus’ silver nose past the shadow line and into sunlight. The glare off the camera lens nearly blinded me. I mentally blinked and Pegasus dimmed the lights a little. 

I could hear the others clanking and rumbling behind me, and a happy string of dirty words coming from Hannah’s big sea creature. Eclipse scuttled past me, but no surprise- Andrew had probably been working out how to move around all night. 

Then Sleipnir was beside me, its equine head and blaze of a railgun nudging up against mine. Gently Joel maneuvered up to my shoulder and held there, just close enough to be close. I knew he couldn’t see my face- none of us could really see one another, but we had a mental awareness- imageless, soundless, but still a clear identity. I drew a bit closer to his in my mental map. 

Together we moved out into the sunlight. Into the open air. 

I wanted to breathe it so badly. 

We moved haltingly, stiff-legged newborn foals, finding our movements and legs. 

I discovered I could fold mine down into nice caterpillar treads, or walk on my knees, or on my proper feet, depending on the terrain. I also found I could pivot much sharper than I thought I could, by dropping one leg and throwing myself around a bit. The first few times were hardly graceful, but then I’m sure the first time I learned to walk had hardly been better. 

Feel, I told myself. Forget what you think it should look like. Just feel the movement. Feel your body. This beast was designed with you as a brain. Drive it like a body. 

So I did. I arched the big neck and found I could reroute exhaust ports through the railgun’s cooling system and make a satisfying snort and cloud of steam. I pawed the ground and half-reared, and found my center of gravity was farther back, to counterbalance the weight of the gun platform and railgun. 

I gave a little jump, and the shock absorbers kept me from jarring my teeth out. 

I could get used to this, I thought. 

Eclipse was scuttling around on the desert floor, chasing rabbits and running circles around Gaia. Gaia was spinning, playing with her lasers and treads and having a ball. Papillion was demurely testing every inch of her solar panels and long, delicate legs. Sleipnir was discovering all the ways eight legs could be made to move and support his core. 

I reared up and screamed, my best impersonation of a horse, and launched myself forwards. The front legs caught me and I tucked the hind up under my belly, letting them catch the ground and propel me. Front legs out again, hind in now, more like a jackrabbit than a true horse gallop, but I was running. Every stride was a little more sure, a little less hesitant. Pegasus caught on fast and pulled up a terrain map on the desert in front of me, with helpful markings for the testing grounds boundary and any objects deemed too dense to be crushed underfoot. I plotted a course with half a thought that sent us weaving between a few short, scruffy trees. The cloud of dust behind us grew thick when I threw my weight aside and turned around the farthest tree to come racing home, trying to outrun the dust, my shadow, the wind, anything. 

I wanted to yell. I wanted to cry. I didn’t know what I wanted to do after that. 

I could _feel_ the body of the steel horse, every piston and panel and battery and the big, hot engines, two of them, converting fuel into energy to run the hydraulics and electronics, and the thousand tiny machines that recovered the waste energy and shuffled it back into secondary systems or batteries for later use. I could feel my own breath racing through the metal, the heat of the sunlight on my back, the little blue cells drinking it in. 

I was Pegasus. 

  


And then I came to a sliding stop, my hind legs half-folded into treads to provide brakes. I kicked up a shower of rocks and dust that came pattering back down around me like rain. Why? I thought. Why? What else was going on here? 

The princess would never have sent us out here if she thought we could escape. It wouldn’t surprise me to know she had the trigger for the dead-man chips in our shoulders or at least a cutoff switch for the machines themselves, to stop them dead should we cross the boundary. 

But why send us out here to play anyway? It was true we represented a huge investment of time, money and labor, perhaps her entire lab’s worth- but it was also true we were built to see battle. These were not prototypes. 

I did not have access to my own weapons, but according to Pegasus’ mechanics logs, they were complete and fully functional. You didn’t put real guns on a prototype. 

Why? 

I queried for the terrain map again and followed the file to its storage point, a little box of similar terrain maps. It included basic maps of the area, the same aerial photo with topographic overlay available to anyone with a mapping device. It also included maps of other areas of the planet. Other countries, or what had been. 

Then I dug deeper into the box. 

Our planet was O-076. All the maps were designated with that number first, then the area number, then the quadrant, and so on. On a hunch, I changed the planetary designation to O-075, one of the other two habitable planets in our solar system. 

The map came up, at the same civilian resolution I had of our own planet, only now with buildings highlighted by little tags. Some were red, some were purple, some were blue, some green. Nice bright letters scrolled across the map’s edge, informing me the green, blue and purple were different kinds of civilian structures. The red buildings were assumed hostile until further information could be gathered. 

Hostile. 

I changed the designation to O-079, the third habitable planet, a smaller planet rich in ore but low in population. Same designations. I pulled up a map of its biggest city center, and found I had a tactical readout of its defenses in my hands. 

I mentally dropped the map. I gathered all the data and shoved it back into its box and clamped down the lid. Had she seen me? Had she been watching my data feed through the data cloner I knew we had buried somewhere in our computers? 

Pegasus caught my agitation and started a train of status queries. I felt my heart rate rise and Pegasus countered by slowing the rate of my breathing until my pulse normalized. I closed my eyes, or gave the same signal to do so, because Pegasus cleared the mental space entirely and left me in audio/ocular darkness and silence for a few minutes. 

I needed to think. 

I needed to tell the others. 

I queried for their positions and found Papillion just a little behind me, shyly sending her own queries about my status. Sleipnir was in front of me, facing me, reaching out with the muzzle of his rail gun to just touch the tip of mine. The gesture was familiar, home-like- a horse-gesture. I snorted, and he snorted back. 

I didn’t dare send any actual information over the network yet, so I played with them a bit and then we returned to the fold. Happy, I thought, if I hadn’t found the maps. 

By the time we were docked I had a fairly good idea of what they meant. But how to communicate with the others, when we couldn’t even touch? 

I decided to keep the maps to myself for the moment, rather than risk a transmission. We probably had the same basic data package; they might acquire it for themselves and come to the same conclusions. 

  


Time passed. I slept, I woke, I lived. On our third time out in the desert, a camera crew was stationed in a cordoned-off area on a hillside above. We ignored them, until Andrew got ahold of their wireless communications and we started playing games. Turned out they had no idea we were five nameless terrorists, and we kept it that way. By the time they left, we’d concocted a lovely story of some local survivors of the war, Kire citizens, naturally; noncombatants who had been tragically caught in the crossfire between the hired mercenaries and had dedicated themselves to becoming Kire’s first defense against any new threat, a defense made up of Kire’s own citizens, so no one would ever have to suffer at the hands of militarized strangers again. We poured no small amount of our own bitterness into the tale; Hannah alone remained silent, and we let them draw their own conclusions as to her identity. I suppose on some level it was a betrayal, but to us it was as close as we could get to speaking with the outside world. 

That evening, the princess was surprisingly casual with us. We had been afraid we’d get grilled our stunt on the field, but she seemed… forgiving, in a slightly intimidating way. 

However, the silence from the others was wearing on me. My awareness of them had not changed- but I wanted the physical contact as well as the mental. I wanted to talk to them without having to watch every word I said. The human part of the big war machine was getting lonely. 

“Tomorrow, we’ll work on something new,” she said. She smiled, in that cat-that-ate-the-canary way of hers, the way that made me want to smack her. “Just because you all did so well today, I’ll teach you the trick of getting out of the demigods.” 

Well, that would be worth knowing, I thought. 

  


The next morning she was true to her word. She stayed well back, in her throne room overlooking the mechanical bay. She sent us the series of commands needed for a ‘safe dismount,’ as they called it. She deemed our bodies had healed enough to function outside the life support systems, though she did warn us our pain receptors would be dulled and thus we shouldn’t move around too much once outside the machines; our bodies were still far from whole. 

Pegasus accepted my query for dismount, but countered with its own biometric scan indicating I would be somewhat unstable when released from the support system. I told it to drop me off anyway, and it began the procedures for dismount. The flow of air changed, gradually, and the computer prompted me to begin breathing on my own, gently withdrawing the tubes and with them the liquid in my lungs, until it was satisfied I could breathe independent of the system. Other physical sensations began returning- I could feel my fingertips and wiggle them when prompted, same for my toes. I felt myself being lowered out of the machine and received a prompt to open my eyes. I did- and closed them again. Even the dim of Pegasus’ stall was too bright on my eyes. 

They hadn’t been open for several days. 

I coughed and tasted the oxygenated liquid in the back of my throat. 

I had to remind myself I hadn’t actually experienced any of the time outside- not the way my brain said I had, at least- and my body would be weak from inactivity and still recovering from the extensive surgeries. 

Pegasus was kind enough to stand me upright with the grapplers that lowered me from the pod, but I felt my knees buckle. Pain dampened or no, when my knee caps hit the cement floor, it hurt. It jarred my spine and the sudden weight of the all the implants. My spine was sheathed in metal, protecting the delicate interface with my nervous system. I touched the back of my skull, carefully, aware my fingers might not be feeling what was actually there- but I could not deny the cold steel, the square plug and prongs at the base of the skull. 

I was changed. 

I looked up at Pegasus. 

Maybe changed for the better- I didn’t know yet. 

The lab children were waiting for us. They had thought ahead and brought padded benches and thick robes down into the mechanical bay so we didn’t have to sit on cold floors and crates for the process of disconnecting the spinal interface and cerebral cord. They left the cords in my forearms for now, so I could still be in communication with Pegasus, and, vicariously, with the lab’s computer system and the princess. 

I removed those cords myself. 

The others were talking, getting up, moving around. I stayed seated. My mind flashed back to the maps- I looked around at the lab children, so young, so innocent- they’d been sheltered through the war here, in the white castle, guided by their lady. They believed they were crafting all this for some greater cause- protection of their planet, maybe. I wondered if they’d caught on to the true purpose of the Pantheon. Kire was building a war machine great enough to unify the solar system, or at least that’s what they wanted to do. That’s what the maps showed. Somewhere, some hive of tacticians was figuring out how to take them, just like they’d taken most of this continent. 

It would be a horrifying war, and we’d put ourselves in the center of it. 

I coughed and covered my mouth with my hand to make myself slow my breathing- biting my wrist wouldn’t have much effect if I couldn’t feel it. 

But I could feel Joel, coming up behind me. He put his hand on my shoulder and gripped. I leaned into his touch, grateful for it. As long as he was here with us, we’d make it through, I thought. He would be our center. 

Once the children were finished with their work, we were escorted back to the lab and, finally, back to our quarters. We’d been told our bodies would take some time adjusting to things not being automatic anymore- anything from choking to incontinence was mentioned- but it seemed as if all systems were still at least somewhat functional. 

  


We couldn’t sit very comfortably, not yet, not with the metal in our backs, so we all sprawled on the mattresses in the little bedroom and talked, grateful to be able to. One at a time, we tapped out our thoughts. Now faced with the chance to, I hesitated to share the map data, but Joel could sense there was something on my mind. He put out his hand and I spoke into it, tapping out as briefly as I could. 

_The next war is for the solar system,_ I said. _The maps show it all._

Joel froze. His eyes grew wide and his jaw clenched. Emily fidgeted closer, wanting to know what we’d said. I passed the message to her and she told Andrew and Hannah. Andrew shook his head. He sat up and slid closer to me. 

_Do they know you know?_

I shrugged. They didn’t seem to. 

_I didn’t even think of that,_ Hannah said. She bit her lip and her cheeks flushed. _How could they? It’s been only a couple months since Vaamin!_

_We don’t know the time line,_ Joel countered. _Maybe months, maybe years._

I shook my head. _Map data too accurate. Time-sensitive- useless a year from now._

_Then there will be war,_ Joel said. 

I looked away. I didn’t want to have brought this message. 

Emily’s hands found mine and she bound my fingers between hers. No more talking, her touch said. No more tonight. No more talk and thoughts of war, not while we’re free of the metal skins and breathing our own air, smelly as it is. 

I ruffled the fluffy new growth of hair on the top of her head. She was right. Time had a way of passing, whether I wanted it to or not- and the machine of war, once started, could not lightly be stopped, not by us cogs and wheels alone. Not without strength. 

  
  



	9. Chapter 9

  
  


We knew something was up when our door stayed mysteriously locked for a full 24 hours. That hadn’t happened in a while- not since we’d started training in the machines. We were more often left inside them for the night, to help speed the healing and integration process, with breaks for only a few hours in the evenings. But this was different- now we were kept from the machines. 

Joel guessed it was the day of the princess’s big party. He paced a little but settled himself to wait, and we waited with him- summons would come soon enough. She could hardly parade the empty machines around, without the citizen heroes the media were convinced we were, and hope for the full pocketbook potential of the fundraiser. She was looking for investors, and investors were looking for people. 

Our door did unlock soon enough, but not for the purpose we imagined. “Come on,” one of the lab children said, “we thought we’d let you watch from afar. This is your fate too.” The five children who had come for us were decked out in formal wear; suits, ties, dresses. It made me a little nostalgic for the parties Hannah’s family used to throw. We’d seldom been officially invited but she usually managed to get us in anyway- an excuse to dress up a bit and taste food and drink well above our pay. 

The children took us to an alcove near the lab –a security station, by the look of it- with the screen turned to a security camera in the lab. No other controls were operational- just the screen. 

The room had been transformed from the long, sterile white laboratory to a dimly-lit cavern of holographic Pantheon projections and fiber-optic drink stations. People milled about, talking quietly, while the lab children and princess answered questions and explained diagrams. The children left us to watch and told us to behave ourselves, as the princess might have need of us later. 

Hannah was scanning the screen with darting eyes. She leaned close and studied faces, then tapped the screen with a satisfied nose. “I know him.” 

The four of us peered into the screen, but the white-skinned balding male in a black suit was unfamiliar. 

“He’s an old friend of my mother’s,” she explained. “He used to come to parties at our house. He’s Kire, but he’s also in the solarfrac business, as a distant investor sort. He liked the extravagant parties and left his money to be managed by other people.” 

“Is he going to be happy to see you?” Emily asked. 

Hannah shrugged. “Probably. He never had any children of his own, so he would spoil me when I was little. I think most of his friends were too much like himself, but my mother was nice to him. I remember him coming by to talk finance with my father just before the war broke out. I think he saw it coming.” She glanced out into the hall and raised her eyebrows. “Do you want to help me with something?” 

“What are you thinking?” Andrew said. “Steal his badge and buy our way out with his money?” 

“Nope. Better.” She jerked her head towards the hall; one of the lab children, a slightly thick girl with curly blond hair piled up in a bun, was on her way to the party. She was in a long black dress, draped enough to hide her figure but cut well. She was also on the shorter side. 

Joel and I stepped into the hall in front of her. She didn’t acknowledge us until she nearly ran into Joel; she wasn’t expecting us to not move out of her way. She looked up, startled, and glanced between us. Slowly, her eyes widened and she mutely shook her head. 

“Calm down,” Emily said, speaking from behind her. “We’re not going to hurt you, we just need a favor. Come with me,” She grabbed the girl’s hand and pulled her down the hall to a women’s washroom. The rest of us followed. 

The girl was near tears. I suppose no one had ever tried to intimidate her before, and she wasn’t taking it very well. She looked up at the three of us boys in the bathroom and opened her mouth to scream. Andrew reached over and clapped his hand down over her mouth. “Be quiet,” he said. “I promise we’re not going to do anything to you.” 

She didn’t look convinced, so Emily leaned down to eye-level with her and spoke. “You know better than anyone that we couldn’t hurt you if we wanted to, and there isn’t much inclination left after all those chemicals and hormones you’ve been giving us. That’s not why we’re here.” 

Andrew took his hand away and the girl gapped like a beached fish. 

“What’s your name?” Emily asked her. 

“Cecil,” she replied. “Why are you doing this?” 

Hannah winked. “I’ve got an old friend I want to see, and I didn’t bring my town cloths. Come on over here,” she pulled the girl into one of the private bathroom stalls and closed the door behind her. “I need your dress, my dear. Be good and hand it over.” 

“And- and- if I don’t?” Cecil gasped. 

“Just because you’ve neutered the cat doesn’t mean you’ve declawed it,” Hannah replied, sweetly. 

A few moments later the black dress appeared over the door of the stall. Hannah shrugged off her robe and slid into it. It wouldn’t pass muster at one of her old parties, but it would do well enough for a lab fundraiser. She tossed her own robe into the stall and waited for Cecil to put it on and reappear. 

The girl did, looking a bit more bedraggled for having lost her hair bun. Hannah rifled through the girl’s purse and pulled out any useful makeup, which she threw on with a practiced hand. 

Nothing could hide the steel in her skull and back, but the rest of her looked more human than any of us had felt in a long time. She also handed Cecil’s glasses to Andrew to keep and he toyed with them gleefully. “Don’t put them on,” she warned, and glanced at Cecil, whose miserable face attested to her knowledge of the glasses’ ability to render even our basic robes transparent. 

I sighed. When would it ever end? 

Hannah winked at us. “Wish me luck,” she said, and slid out the bathroom door. 

We watched her back on the alcove screen; she entered the lab and maneuvered through the partygoers until she found the arm of the man she had recognized. He turned, startled, but appeared pleased to see her. They spoke, her mouth close to his ear, for some time. Then she led him around the lab, pointing out each different little holographic projection of Pantheon’s war machines. I looked for the princess, but it seemed the two were successfully avoiding each other. 

Then they met, abruptly, and the princess recoiled as if she’d planted her face into a glass wall. I guessed this stunt wasn’t quite as acceptable as making up tales about Kire martyrs. The princess went white and her lips set in a hard, thin line. Hannah just smiled and formally introduced her old friend to her new boss. I wondered if the princess had given her name. 

They spoke for a few moments, then wandered off…. But the princess’s demeanor had changed completely. She was on a war path. 

Cecil shrank back into a corner. “She’s going to kill you guys for this,” she said. 

“She was going to do that anyway,” Andrew retorted. He set the glasses on his forehead and glanced at Cecil, who blanched. 

“No she wasn’t,” Cecil said. “She told us plans had changed. The demigods’ software is built from your own subconscious and interactions. You can’t replace the pilot without replacing the entire software system.” 

“Did she know that before?” Joel asked. 

Cecil shook her head. “It’s something we developed to increase the quality of the interface. We wanted the machines to be more intuitive than the smart tanks already on the market. We thought if we could build a functioning AI based on a template of your own brains, we could make a smart machine that didn’t require the neural interface, but it doesn’t work like that. The AI only copied; its capacity for learning is too limited to ever function without the audio/ocular input. I mean, it can function, but it’s just like any other tank.” 

“You’re one of the coders?” Andrew asked. 

Cecil nodded. “I helped write the code for the visual portion of the interface. We tested it on blind volunteers and they seemed to like it pretty well, but meshing it with the machines was harder than we thought it would be.” 

“Does the core know you’re trying to build combat-capable AI?” 

“No. We’re not, really- we want a machine that can function with the speed of human reflex, but without needing all the implants.” 

“It’s the only way to get us out of the equation.” 

She shrugged. “Not really. It’s more that most people won’t be willing to go through all this just to pilot one machine for the rest of their lives.” 

“And there are only so many terrorists to go around.” 

“That’s not fair,” she retorted. She’d lost a little of her fear in talking about her work but anger was giving her courage now. “We all know what you did. It’s easy to forget, because you’ve been cooperative here, but I don’t know why you think you deserve to live beyond this project anyway. You should be grateful for what freedom and life you do have.” 

This was news to us. “What did we do, exactly?” Joel asked. “That war was such a long time ago, I’m beginning to forget.” He stood before her, arms crossed over his chest, glaring down at her. 

She shrank back, her courage gone. “You’re Vaamin!” she cried. “You slaughtered your own people! How can you think we’d give you your freedom after that?” 

Joel looked at Andrew and I and Emily, and we looked back. We’d never imagined that would be their perception of us. We didn’t think they knew anything about us at all- not such a pack of lies. 

She spoke again and her voice caught. “We didn’t want to believe it after how you all were- you just took everything we did to you. You acted like you didn’t care. Hannah swears at us all the time but she’s the most friendly. I can’t imagine any of you doing those things, but I know you still did them. Everyone knows about how Vaamin destroyed themselves just like Izos, when all we wanted was to unify with them! Your governments had even capitulated before the towns were destroyed! The only people who survived were the ones who had fled to Kire!” 

“Cecil,” Emily knelt in front of the girl. “We didn’t know you thought that about us,” she said. “But your information is a little off. Can I tell you what really happened?” 

“How can I believe you?” 

Emily looked at Andrew and held out her hand. Andrew dropped the glasses into it. She handed them to Cecil. “How many times have your people looked at us through these? You know how they can see right through our clothing. You hear every word we say. You control what we put into our bodies and when we sleep and how much pain we’re in. You even have a device that will kill any of us, at any time, if you want it to.” 

She tapped the glasses. “But we’re protecting you. You expect us to treat you as you’ve treated us- as an object, a piece of equipment- but we won’t. Hannah needed your dress- we needed your cooperation- so she could go talk to an old friend. That friend is Kire. He used to be her parents’ business partner and investor. She was like his granddaughter. Cecil, please believe me. Vaamin thought Kire had destroyed Izos’s solarfracs. We had been told they had hired mercenaries to go in and blow them up, and that hundreds of thousands of people had been killed. 

“But when we talked to the mercenaries that Vaamin had hired, they said the entire thing had probably been a mistake- something neither side wanted. But can’t you understand how scared we were? Most of Vaamin never knew that. We saw Kire as a big, bully country that just wanted to take our land and resources and didn’t care at all about our people. After our town was evacuated, Hannah’s parents stayed behind to blow up the solarfrac. They destroyed an empty town. So did all the others, or at least all that could. Some probably did blow up people too- things do go wrong- but none of us set out to commit mass murder. 

“We five were in a mercenary camp for just a few weeks before the war ended. When the battle reached us, the mercenaries put us in a truck and sent us running so we wouldn’t be involved in the fighting. It wasn’t until we reached the border after our home’s solarfrac was destroyed that we learned we’d been branded terrorists for Hannah’s parents’ sacrifice. Hannah’s parents probably didn’t even know Vaamin had capitulated when they blew the solarfrac, but they wanted to blow it up themselves, with themselves as the only deaths, rather than let someone else use the explosion as a weapon.” 

Cecil stared at Emily. Her eyes were wide, still fearful, but with the beginnings of understanding. “We didn’t know about that,” 

“I know. I want you to tell the others,” Emily said. “I don’t know what the princess will do to us in revenge for Hannah going out there, but it’ll happen soon.” 

Soon was correct. Soon was too correct. Four armed guards, of the imposing variety we hadn’t seen since our first few days in the facility, arrived at the alcove. “You, come with me,” one said. He was pointing to Emily.

“Not alone,” I said. I placed myself between her and the guard. 

“Just her,” he said. He made a motion to push me aside but I blocked his arm. 

“You need a pair,” I replied. “They’ll want to see both male and female. Take us both, or none at all.” 

The guard regarded me coolly for a moment, then shrugged. “Fine. Come with me.” He shuffled us out of the alcove and down the hall. 

Emily’s hand found mine. She interlaced our fingers and glanced sidelong at me. I shrugged. I no longer cared if they heard what we said. “It’s the party,” I said. “I think we’re entertainment.” 

“This is her revenge?” 

“I’m afraid so.” 

“I can’t imagine what more she could do to us.” 

“I’m sure she’ll be creative.” 

And then we were in the laboratory, its familiar brightness dimmed to just a few artificial flames and the glowing holograms of each demigod. People mingled, sipping drinks and eating things that smelled like real food. I needed a moment just to catch my breath amongst the scents of food, wine and alcohol, perfume and cloth. Normal smells. Nonsterile, nonchemical, nonmetal smells. 

The guards escorted us to the front of the lab, to a raised platform in front of the windows that overlooked the mechanical bay. The princess was there, talking something technical about the interface system. She gestured to us and we stepped up beside her, and faced the roomful of dignitaries. 

Then I realized it. Every single person in the room was wearing a pair of those hated glasses. Every person was now looking at the two of us, seeing just skin and steel. The princess indicated for us to turn around so they could see the spinal interface. We did so. Mechanically. Emily’s fingers tightened on my hand. 

We turned back around. I didn’t hear anything she said- I was looking out at that crowd- men and women who looked back at us with faces flushed from alcohol and excitement- at eyes ranging up and down us in ways we could not. Looking at Emily in a way I could not. 

I hated everyone in the room right then. 

I made myself breathe slowly, deeply. I couldn’t let them see me move, couldn’t let them see my weakness. I was glad the hand Emily held was the one I usually bit. The princess nodded to us to step down and I turned in time to see her superior look of victory. 

Instead of escorting us out, the guards held us in place. We were scrutinized; the potential investors wanted to see just what plugged in where, how far the spinal interface went, ask questions about the integration process. We kept fairly silent and let the lab children do the answering, but when asked about the reasoning behind our sacrifice by those who had only heard the media fiction, Emily answered for us both: 

“We do this to make sure no one else ever has to suffer what we have suffered,” she replied. “Once we gain strength, we gain the ability to grant freedom to others, to protect others, from such horrific, dehumanizing things.” 

The princess didn’t like her answer but I don’t think anyone else realized what we were talking about. Hannah kept a low profile throughout, though she did introduce us to her friend. He was a genial older man, easygoing and clearly oblivious to Pantheon’s darker actions. 

Later the three of us finally escaped the party and found our way back to our quarters. Hannah traded her dress for her robe again and Cecil fled; we hoped our conversation might have made an impact, but only time would tell. 

  
  



	10. Chapter 10

  
  


The next day all things appeared normal. The lab was converted back and we spent most of the afternoon inside the demigods, in the mechanical bay, testing various systems and working on reflex programming. Andrew was making good headway on improving the machines’ AI and he wasn’t afraid to call on Cecil by name for coding work. The rest of us concentrated on gaining better physical control over the internal systems and mechanics, until we could manipulate the more complex energy cycling, exhaust system, water purification systems, targeting interface and mapping modules with the same ease of swallowing or blinking. 

But that night things changed. 

We had dropped out of the demigods’ bellies and made our way back to our quarters, physically numb and disoriented, as a day inside the machine always ended, when I felt the first stabbing pain in the back of my neck. 

I was vaguely aware of Andrew’s startled cry before my legs gave out and I went sprawling onto the floor, unable to coordinate limbs for the haze of pain in my mind. 

My spine would not work. My legs would not work. My head felt as if it were split down the back. I think I screamed but I couldn’t be sure; I just knew something had gone terribly wrong with myself and I couldn’t make it go away. 

Then it passed, as quickly as it had come; the pain was gone, replaced only by a tremor in my hands and feet and a deep nausea in my throat. Andrew and I both stumbled for the bathroom. The demigods fed us on a mix of essential nutrients and digestible material, and I found it to be as tasteless coming up as it had been going down, and considerably more unpleasant. 

“What was that?” I asked. 

Emily’s face was white and Joel’s was furious. He strode to the door and pounded on it, but no one answered. He shouted into his bracelet for someone to come, but no one did. 

Then it came again and I doubled over from the pain. There was no position that relieved it- nothing I could do to lessen it. Emily took my hands and nearly shrieked herself when I gripped them. I didn’t remember much of the night- just the pain, the brief moments of respite- finding myself curled on one of the mattresses, Emily cradling my head and holding my hands, crying herself, while Joel held Andrew to keep him from thrashing around and injuring himself further. Both of us had damaged the tissue around our implants from our struggles and there was blood on the mattresses. 

I woke to find my wrists wrapped in torn cotton sheet material. From the threads between my teeth, I guessed what I’d been doing to them. Emily was still asleep, curled beside me. She looked exhausted; I guessed I looked worse. 

Andrew was sleeping as well, with Joel and Hannah on either side of him to keep him from hitting a wall. I never thought I’d see someone’s face literally lined with pain, but his was. What had happened? I guessed the pain blockers had been turned off for the two of us, but how? Why the flickering on and off? Some kind of technical malfunction, or was this just another of the princess’s power play? I didn’t know. 

I disentangled myself from the sheets and limbs and found my way to the washroom. I splashed cold water on my face and winced- my face was bruised and my lips were cracked. I twisted to see my back, if I could, and from the edge of spinal interface I could see I’d done a fair amount of damage. The flesh around the implants, which had been healing nicely just the day before, was now red and swollen, hot to the touch, and much of it was crusted with dried blood and fluid. 

Emily came into the washroom behind me, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “How are you feeling?” she asked. 

“Not good,” I replied. “The pain dampener still isn’t working right. I’m… functional, but not much more.” 

“You think she did this?” 

I nodded. 

“I hate her.” 

“I do too.” 

The door chimed and a guard poked his head in, calling for the morning lab session. I ignored him. Joel roused Hannah; he didn’t bother waking Andrew, but just picked him up and carried him out, down the hall, to the lab. I made it there leaning on Emily, every step sending a fresh jolt of pain up my spine. 

The lab children were furious. I went to my station and the boy there took one look at my back and called for a medical aid. We were both taken downstairs and plugged into the machines immediately, to at least alleviate the pain and run diagnostics on the implants. 

I threw myself into Pegasus’ computer interface and queried frantically at Andrew. He replied, sleepily, but relieved to be free of the pain. 

I opened my eyes and overlayed Pegasus’ visual input with what I was seeing in the lab. Pegasus was smart enough to switch its own ocular input from its usual cameras to my own eyes; my field of view was limited to what I could physically see, but Pegasus provided nice information on anything in that view. 

Including biometric scans of any people in my vicinity. 

I glanced at the child slathering anti-inflammatory cream on my back. While inside Pegasus, I hadn’t zeroed in on the lab children or mechanics much- our usual focus was just to get out the door- but now I wished I’d used this function sooner. 

I could see his probable age, blood pressure, heart rate, projected anxiety levels, and a number of other biometric signals that meant little to me, but identified him as who he was. I still couldn’t read the name from his coat but I did know he was angry. Very angry. And not at me. 

His fingers touched the hard spot covering the kill-chip and lingered there. I knew he was thinking hard. 

  


That evening, we collected again in our quarters. Andrew and I had our pain dampeners functional again and were sprawled out across the two small, hard couches in the room. Our backs were uncomfortable all the same, with the skin tight across the swollen places and still intermittently seeping blood. Joel was pacing back and forth, his jaw tight and his eyes hard. I could see the wheels turning in his head; the princess had voided their arrangement, from his point of view; there was nothing accidental about the equipment malfunctioning just after Hannah’s escapade at the party. 

Hannah was more optimistic. 

“He’s bought in,” she said. “He’s one of the biggest investors, and one of his main stipulations is knowing our whereabouts. I told the princess I was keeping up our end of the bargain. 

“Do you trust him?” Emily asked. She ran her fingers idly along my arm and touched the scars on my wrist. 

“Yes, I do,” Hannah replied. “He told me about how my parents had died. He’d hoped they would use a remote detonator like some people had, but he agreed with their sacrifice. It was just bad timing that they didn’t blow it until after we capitulated. They weren’t terrorists, they just didn’t want Kire running roughshod over them. They would have lost the solarfrac anyway. He said the government confiscated every remaining source of power in Izos and Vaamin and no one was compensated. They’d have taken all our land and homes and everything in the area, and moved all the people to the big refugee camps out on the flats. I think my parents made the right decision to blow it all up rather than hand it over, and there were only fifteen other deaths in Neartree aside from them. He said they went around to all the townspeople and told them what was going to happen and when a few days before they blew it. The only people in town were those who chose to stay with them.” 

“Everyone who left was on the bridge that collapsed,” Andrew said. 

“Yes, they were,” I replied. “But that wasn’t something we can call someone’s fault. It just…” I stopped. I hadn’t thought about my parents in a long time. I’d buried their memory deep, the day we left for the mercenary camp. I’d said goodbye to them. I’d hugged my mother and promised her we’d be safe, as safe as we could be in a war, and that someday we’d come back. 

I hadn’t been able to keep that promise. I never would. 

Our door opened and Joel turned with all the pondering fury of a landslide. The three lab children in the doorway cowered back, but he checked himself and raised his eyebrows. 

The one in the lead, a tall boy with thin limbs and a narrow face, extended his hand. He was holding a strange device, half firearm and half medical instrument. “We’d like to use this, if you’ll let us,” he said. 

“What is that?” Hannah asked. She took it from him and examined it; the shape was familiar to me, though I couldn’t have said from where. 

Andrew knew better. He levered himself up off his sofa. “You’d remove our kill-chips?” he asked. 

“We would,” the tall boy replied. 

“Does she know?” Joel asked. 

The boy shook his head. “But we’ve turned off all the surveillance tonight. She turned it off last night- that’s how she did what she did to you two,” he looked at Andrew and me. “Your bracelets record biometric indicators for pain and are independent of the room’s surveillance. We weren’t sure what you were, so we thought it’d be best if we knew if one of you hurt another.” He shrugged. “Remember, we were told you were terrorists. Violent criminals, who’d murdered your own people. But Cecil’s story makes sense. You’ve had ample opportunity to hurt us, destroy our work, destroy each other, but you haven’t. You’ve put up with… with…” he looked away. “With things we’d never have done to our own people. That’s why we’re here.” 

Joel nodded. He took the device from Hannah and handed it back to the child. “Go ahead.” 

Removing the chips was just as painful as having them installed, and afterwards they told us there had been a small risk of the poison capsule detonating and killing everyone in the room. 

We didn’t sleep much that night. 

  


The notion of true freedom was long behind us, but the notion of exercising a little free will was not. 

It didn’t seem like we would have much of a chance at it, though. The next day, the princess had some big news. 

The government had accepted Pantheon’s proposal and wanted to see us in action as soon as possible. She informed us, as a casual aside, that ten new candidates were being prepped in a separate facility. Volunteers, she said. Her own people. Ready to step in should anything go wrong for us. 

“That means a live fire demonstration,” Joel said. 

She nodded. “We’ll be flying you out to one of Kire’s arenas this afternoon. Don’t forget to pack your things,” she said. 

  


She was true to her word, and that afternoon we, inside our war beasts, were airlifted across a section of desert to a remote lakebed that served Kire as its proving grounds for new military technology. After the wars, it seemed several different labs had been vying for the government contracts to build the country’s battle platforms. 

The live fire drill commenced at mid-day, under a brilliant sun, and pitted us against three automated towers. The towers were loaded with electromagnetic pulses, strong enough to trip our movement systems and leave us frozen, but not strong enough to harm essential circuits. We hoped. I identified seventeen different dignitaries, both men and women, and once we synchronized our observational data, I saw Andrew had matched their insignias with their backers: four were from the Kire military, top people. Their tags gave them priority status, even over us. I wondered what would happen if one of them were to contradict the princess’s orders. 

We set out into the sunlight and pulled up the terrain map. The desert terrain was rough and pitted, unfamiliar territory, and the three towers were spaced through it. The princess gave us the signal, and the towers powered up. 

Pegasus flagged all three instantly. I zeroed in on the first one and queried for its schematics. Pegasus drew a blank, but gave me a probable layout for power distribution and weapons systems. I queried for a targeting lock on the nearest one, and it targeted me right back. 

Pegasus screamed and dodged, just in time. I wondered if I just imagined the sting of the narrow miss across the groves in my metal hide. I flared my armor panels and reversed them, showing their rubberized, insulated flanks. According to their specifications, they could take a much more powerful EMP than the towers were rated to fire, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to test that theory this early in the game. 

I queried Joel for a strategy update and he fed back a plan. He, Andrew and I scattered ourselves out in front of Emily and Hannah. Andrew sent me a small program package and I uploaded it- it ran a small charge through my ‘wings’ and bounced transponder signals off them, duplicating my radio signal into three or four Pegasuses spaced just a few feet apart. Not much, but enough to make a direct hit into a near miss. Eclipse and Slepnir didn’t have the wings, and thus didn’t have the option, so I wondered just how Andrew had come up with his little trick. 

I didn’t wonder long. We were moving forward, zigzagging between blue bolts while the girls ran cover fire from behind and kept the targets busy. Eclipse got close enough to acquire schematics and sent them along- we didn’t want to send the targets up in a pillar of fire, not if they were hypothetically manned, or contained interesting technology. 

I kept my wings up and scattered fire from the first tower while Emily slunk in behind my wings and charged her own emp. She targeted based on Eclipse’s read of the tower’s electrical systems and shot for the link between its weapons and its power supply. The link was shielded, naturally, but not shielded well enough. Papillion’s guns were powered by her solar array; she released enough power to fry the entire tower, but targeted to a glancing blow- the shielding diffused enough of it to protect the tower’s electronics, but still shorted the power supply circuitry and the tower fell silent. I targeted the same location on the second tower and used my emp, with a slightly more direct hit- mine wasn’t nearly as powerful. 

Two towers down. Slepnir was getting creative with his. He sidelined close, dodging bolts with only a hair’s distance to spare. Slepnir reared and screamed, brandishing all four forelegs, and fired his railgun. 

The tower exploded. Really exploded. Slepnir had used an incendiary against it. 

He slammed his four front legs down and turned, slowly, to the hilltop full of dignitaries. He didn’t exactly point his railgun at them but he did pin back his little triangular targeting guides and _scream,_ a sound of wrenched metal with the squall of electronic speaker feedback. The dignitaries covered their ears and turned away from the noise, but the effect was clear. 

We were dangerous. 

We were machines of destruction. 

  


We had twelve more live-fire drills, and by then every single military investor on the planet had bought into the Pantheon corporation, and the princess was swimming in money. 

Exactly one month after the first drill, scarcely three days from the last, war was declared. 

On the unified continent Kire. 

By O-075. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok that's as far as I got back in 2013. I have some other scenes I wrote in '14 & '15, but nothing that directly follows this. Continuation of this first draft will happen on and off as inspiration and ideas come! The whole story is plotted and outlined, but the actual narrative hasn't been all written yet :P naturally.


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